Please set somethings straight

[jonnyholt]

as a recent majesticSEO subscriber, I feel like i have either been mislead or something isn't right.  For some reason I was thinking it was best to have a single link from a single domain, and that by have too many links from a single domain (backlinks) the ratio between referring domains and backlinks was a factor in pagerank.  In domain analysis here, it would seem that is not that case as it puts a nice big green check mark by the person with most links, whether they are from 1 domain or multiple domains.  Is this a good thing?  Here's an easy example.

I am a website designer, and I have the ability to link to my website in the footer of every website I design either by image or by text.  If I do that, obviously I would have a link from every page on the site, but only from one root domain.  Is this a good thing or a bad thing.  My work around is to have a link in the footer that looks like this "website design by homecutcreative.com" that links to an internal page that has one link to my site, therefore keeping my referring domain : backlink ratio to a 1 which I was under the assumption was the best possible situation.  Thanks for your help.

[Njave_MCP]

Sir, this is where I completely agree! I have a client who's been hit by what seems to be link spam. Some 100-150 domains pointing to their site from low quality websites with no use whatsoever. Client is completely honest, doesn't do optimization and/or link building and there's no way we are thinking anybody from our side went and created it. To other knowledge, it seems some of these sites are just bot scraping services that use content from other sites, but not important here. Here's the important part ...

After Penguin 2.0 rankings have dropped somewhat. But the issue at hand was never the 120-150 spammy links which we are pretty positive Google has devalued already. Issue at hand is that the client wasn't producing quality content, useful content or anything in between that will help their website and business grow. We are still debating on whether to use the disavow tool or not, but that's a whole different subject on it.

My point here is that thing happens, specially in a highly saturated niche like the one my client is in. On another example (from a guy I know who shares his wisdom) something similar happened to his client. No disavow tool used, no special link creating technique used, just honest, healthy and amazing content that proved useful to his client's needs later on.

They have dropped severely in rankings after what seemed to be bad link spam from a competitor and have been doing discounts, special packages, information on ordering such a service (they range from $500-1200 depending on nature and distance of it) and they got around 50-80 super healthy links (authority sites in the niche, some big websites, some huge blog networks promoted their post and such) where they regained their rankings, surpassed them and are now #2-5 on several highly competitive keywords.

Those extremely great (some PR6-8) links have severely influenced their link portfolio! They have managed to pull ahead thanks to quality content, useful and smart services, great promotions and one important aspect ... amazing social media campaigns as well. Where I sincerely believe in most cases the issue is never quantity, but quality!

Same thing with negative SEO which cannot happen with a highly useful and amazing website and service. Same thing with footer links. You cannot be held accountable if someone goes online and buys 2000-3000 low quality links to ruin your efforts. But I believe that even one, high page rank authority site with thousands of users can mean more than 100-1000 spammy links that usually get devalued right away.

[cbielich]

Ok I edited it, sorry about that I'm tired

[jonnyholt]

Can you say that last paragraph again in a different way?  I think there's a typo that's making it hard for me to understand.

[cbielich]

Let me give you a real world example of the relevancy of links

In my niche it is semi competitive with tons of revenue from Adsense. Users in my niche tend to use tools for help and use them over and over again which in turn increase the page views exponentially.

The top website in my niche which dominates almost every keyword has a total of 123 linking root domains and 7,683 links back to their site. In looking at the top keyword for my niche the second place website has 41 linking root domains and 238 total links back to their site.

That is a huge difference...

It only proves that relevancy is more powerful than anything else. If anything study the top 10 in your niche and pick the ones with the lowest linking root domains and total links. Then study their back link profile with a fine tooth and comb. Try and obtain those links and I'm sure you will see results.

[NateStewart]

oh and if you are still concerned about it adding them or not and dont want to risk anything. there is one trick that will serve only for branding.

add the use the proper containing words such as "site designed by" then add the name ad your company and make it a link to your site.

Here's the trick...

add a no follow to the txt file for your link.

That way your link to your site is still there but so people can use it if they want but there is no penalty for it being there it also wont affect your page rank.

[RepLoc_Tim]

"Natural" is the key phrase in your question.  100 links from a site typically isn't natural, but it may be.  Considerations include:

1.  Is the site relevant to your site?

2. Is the site "alive" with lots of activity, and not abandoned.  Often bot spam hits abandoned sites, including EDU sites where nobody is monitoring them for spam or replying to comments.

3. Is the site an authority site within your niche?

4. Does it have suspicious external linking patterns (Penguin spammy stuff)?

5. What kind of links do you have?

• Are they exact match keyword phrases used instead of your name when commenting on a blog post - if so, this is spam and 100 of them will hurt you.

• If they are legit blog comments and engagement scattered among high authority blog posts using your name without stuffing keywords, then it might be "natural."

• Are they footer links on an unrelated website that has over 100 pages?  (web designer tactic) Might hurt rather than help

• Or did a niche authority site decide to add your awesome site as a resource in their sidebar?  Likely to help, not hurt

• Is it coming from paid advertorial links?  Bad.

These are just some examples.  Unfortunately, there is not a straight forward answer as there are a lot of variable to consider.  However, if you use these considerations, usually you can answer the question of whether or not the links are helpful links or hurtful links.

[NateStewart]

As far as the footer links go, I believe google has stated that the have devalued them because of the issues with out niche links like web designers and seo and such. That being said it i haven't seen and problems with them so long as you use them with proper containing words e.g."website designed by..." Google bots are smart enough to understand that.

I would agree that there are plenty of people using the footer links in ways that just get them penalized. It does more for branding than it does for adding value to clients. besides most people aren't looking at the footer links anyway unless they are looking for the designer or something like that or just happen to scroll to the bottom.

I personally use it for branding purposes mainly. I think Google will work this issue out in time.

[jonnyholt]

so if there is a root domain with 100 links, it's not a negative so long as they are natural?

[RepLoc_Tim]

Couple of resources to check out:

http://yoast.com/footer-design-by-links/

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/lifting-a-manual-penalty-given-by-google-personal-experience

http://www.weidert.com/whole_brain_marketing_blog/bid/114916/6-Surefire-Ways-to-Piss-Off-Google-Penguin-Tarnish-Your-SEO

[RepLoc_Tim]

First issue is regarding links to domain ratio.  Do a quick audit of the top 10 competitors for any of your terms.  Run them through majestic and see what their ratio is.  It will always be a multiple.  The ratio isn't as much a problem as the source.  For instance, if you are active on an authority blog within your niche, you might comment on lots of posts.  Since the blog is an authority and there isn't much spam, these are relevant and higher value links than blog spam where someone ran a bot and found spam ready blog networks that will take your links all day long and all of the commenter names are exact match keywords instead of natural looking names.  In this example, the ratio might be the same, but there is a big difference in the SEO impact to your site.

I advise against a footer link attribute back to your site.  This is bad form and it does not add value to your clients or their visitors - all web developers should consider stopping this practice.  As far as SEO goes, I doubt most of your client sites are within your niche , so what signal do you think that is sending.  Using an anchor text about your topic and putting it on a client's site on a different topic doesn't make sense from an SEO standpoint.  Besides footer links and attributes already having low power, adding them to unrelated niche sites is not going to help you in my opinion.  There are plenty of cases of these footer links getting web developers penalized in Penguin over the past 12 months.

Is your objective SEO or self-advertising?  If you are proud of your work and just want the advertising, then use your brand (company name) without a link: "Site design by Company Name."  Let potential clients find you by searching for you name which helps your authority.

Hope this helps.

[NateStewart]

That is a very good question. I hadn't really thought about that. I have links in the footer of client sites. I did see somewhere that i was getting something like 20 or more link from one site, but I knew that the only link to my site was in the footer.

That being said, so far I haven't seen any problem with it. Maybe somehow the search engines know that it is a footer link and automatically counts it as one even though it shows up on every page. They seem to be smart like that sometimes.

Even so, I don't believe that having multiple links from one domain is a bad thing. For example if i posted several blog posts on seomoz and it linked back to my site, I wouldn't get hurt for it or anything. Therefore I believe it is safe to say that a footer link that is NOT directed to an internal link like you said is okay. I also haven't read anything to suggest otherwise.

Hope this helps. Maybe run a test with a site or two and see what happens. If something happens then just simply change it back. Maybe it will actually improve thing for you. Worth a shot at least.

Good luck in your link building endeavors!