How Can I Outlink Web Designer Link Building from Their Clients' Footer
-
_I used open site explorer to view the backlinks for a competitor of an agency I work with. They have ten times as many links, if not more, than we do, and I noticed there were only a few more domains linking back to them. As I dug deeper I noticed these links were coming from the footer tag they put on their clients' sites like "Site Designed by __." If a site had 20 pages, they had 20 links back...weird and annoying that it counts.
They have more clients for web design than we do, so their bulk linking could continue to outrank us. Any suggestions on how we can outrank them locally? We are in the midst of redesigning our entire site to build out more pages and have much better internal linking.
Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks everyone!
-
Nofollow links still pass some authority, but no where near an in body link. I commented on blogs like Website Magazine, and a few other real high authority blogs. I just used my actual name, and didn't try optimize the link.
Ranking for web design is definitely a little different because of inflated numbers. You should also keep in my that link analysis tools, like Moz and Majestic, don't find every link on the internet, and can take a while to discover some links. Always take these stats with a grain of salt, and focus on getting quality links.
If you are working local you can always try identify links pages in your area. I was able to get one from a couple historical societies and a mall just by asking for it. You can also have a link in your signature on forums, but try to limit these since too many would look spammy.
-
It is very frustrating when you see something like that - things you know are "wrong" but a competitor gets away with it.
I am going to skip the whole preaching about "don't worry too much about competitors or what they do" thing, and point out that if you are going to count/compare links, it is best to look at number of linking domains rather than total links.
100 sitewide footer credit links from one site is not really the same as 100 links from 100 different sites.
-
Thanks for the quick reply Who Wudda Thunk. You said you used just a handful of nofollow links, which sounds contradictory to me. Were these links in comment sections of high profile sites, forums, or simply in-body links from high ranking blogs/news sites?
Sorry I sound oblivious, but this is the first time I ran into an issue with the footer links. I usually go against other local small businesses that I can outrank.
-
Matt Cutts has talked about the diminishing returns of multiple links from a single domain. His video says that anything after 2 gets to be pretty minimal.
The other thing you need to consider is that site wide footer links aren't as strong as an in body link. If you are doing your part to get legitimate in body links, through interviews or contributing to a blog in some way, then you are going to get farther than these site wides.
I ran into a similar problem with one of my sites. I was up against a dozen web designers who have built hundreds of websites, but I was able to outrank them with just a handful of nofollow links. They weren't great at on site SEO, which helped, but I knew that a lot of these links weren't worth much.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Community Discussion: When The 'Coupon Drawer' Is More Influential Than Your Best Friend ...
Howdy To Our Super Community! When I was a kid, I was always fascinated by ladies who spent hours combing through newspapers and mailers, clipping coupons to put in a coupon drawer for future shopping excursions. It seemed like a lot of trouble to go to in order to save a a few bucks, especially given that I grew up in an era that still boasted a pretty stable middle class, but, it turns out, those ladies of yore were really onto something. A recent survey by Bazaarvoice and CMO Council found that coupons and discounts drive way more return/loyalty business amongst modern shoppers than any other factor, including recommendations from family and friends and paid advertising. Another survey by ROTH and Research Now discovered that 70% of millennial moms sought and downloaded mobile coupons while doing their shopping chores. There are a couple of facets of these findings that should interest any e-commerce business or local retailer. We've learned from a variety of studies that it can cost up to 7x more to earn a new customer than to retain an existing one, making loyalty programs smart business. Meanwhile, publications like the Wall Street Journal have made it clear that, in the U.S., the middle class is no longer the majority. These two factors seem to lend themselves to an important discussion for our community here at Moz, and in the marketing world at large. What is driving 70% of young mothers to use mobile coupons, as per the above study? Is it tight budgets, the love of a deal, pride in outsmarting 'the system' with a little extra effort? Is your company using coupons? Which ones have you seen convert most highly? Is there some element to them you've discovered to be a real winner? Interestingly, price is repeatedly cited as a minor factor in customer complaints, and yet, I've personally seen discounts/sales drive business like mad in both e-commerce and retail settings. Just how powerful is the love a deal? I would love it if you'd contribute your coupon/discount savvy to a discussion here, to help our community better latch onto this massively powerful influence. What are your thoughts and first-hand experiences?
Local SEO | | MiriamEllis2 -
How can you add custom Structured Data to a website hosted on Squarespace?
I have a client with a simple one page landing website hosted on Squarespace. Is there any method to easily apply structured data to this format?
Local SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Is using emoji's in meta descriptions a good or bad idea ? - I haven't seen it used much hence my query
Hello Mozzers, We need to redo some of our meta descriptions as our CTR's are not to good. I've noticed one of my competitors using emoji's which I personally think looks pretty good. They are using the Phone icon and ticks - as calls to action etc However, I can't see hardly anyone else using them on general serps ...so I am wondering , is it a bad idea ? thanks Pete
Local SEO | | PeteC120 -
What can I do to rank higher than low-quality low-content sites?
We lost our site in an actual meltdown at our hosting provider in January, and decided to do a new site instead of bring back a dated backup. So we've only been "active" at our URL since about May. That said, I have not seen any irregular or unexpected penalties. Not showing up is natural if you have literally nothing to show. We have had a site since then, though, and while it isn't going to win any award, we've built it with best practices using sites like this, trying to use natural, helpful, actual language to convey what we do and why we do it (we're web developers for small business making WordPress sites). Paying attention to titles, keyword frequency and variability, alt tags, etc. Always erring on the conservative side. While we build sites for people across the country (and a few in places like the UK), we just moved into an actual office space in our hometown so it's never been more important to push our visibility locally. We've just come back on the scene, in relative terms, so there's no expectation we'll crack the top five or ten; they all have teams of people and bags of capital and have been around many, many years, plus they link to the dozens upon dozens of sites they have done and promote their appearances in press releases and such. Their content is not bad, and most of it is good and not spammy. They are being genuine. That said, we're in the late 40s to late 50s right now. Happy to show up at all, but after that first group of legitimate sites, there are automatically generated webpages (which I thought couldn't even be listed...one is an MP3 download site that mentions one of the top companies in the page title, and just has a random video on the page) local companies touting themselves as SEO "experts" that say things like "Here at Company X, we work hard to bring you the best Rochester, NY web design in the hopes that when you make your Rochester, NY web design decisions, you'll think of us first Rochester, NY web design." I changed the company name and the location, but that's an actual line from their site job listings from places like Craigslist and Indeed hair stylists dentists (?!) Our code validates, we've incorporated Schema for our addresses, our site is usually fast (650ms to 1.3s in Pingdom from Dallas). We don't do any redirecting, our metas likes everyone else's don't count for ranking but are thoughtfully produced, we pay attention to using concise and accurate URLs without stop words, etc. There are also very very few resources loaded on a given page. That said, there's not a lot on the blog that's new and all told we have I think 13 total pages including a few posts. Is it even possible to get close to the actual pack if we, for example, posted more regularly? I was just reading here about how we shouldn't put our links in the site footers of our clients (which we don't always anyway), so I have them only as branded links, only on the homepages, and only on sites that, when crawled, didn't have nonzero spam scores (everyone else has a nofollow link in our portfolio). I realize this is a super generic question but I wasn't quite sure how to search out this particular use case given that our aspirations are so basic...just trying to figure out if there's something obvious we're missing and shooting ourselves in the foot over. A thousand pledges of gratitude! (if this is too common and I just didn't see a duplicate, let me know and I will delete it or ask for it to be deleted....also, I don't want to appear spammy so I am not linking to my site unless it's absolutely necessary...not sure what protocol is...I'm pretty self-aware so I do believe everything I've said above is true).
Local SEO | | eaglenestmedia1 -
How to market web design and SEO company locally
Hello, I'm looking for easy (yah right, correct?) ways to market locally my web solutions company. I do web design, E-commerce web design, and I start informational and E-commerce companies for people starting at $1000/month - only new companies, later I'll do a little more E-commerce stuff. Looking for inexpensive, fairly easy ways to market locally. Thanks!
Local SEO | | BobGW0 -
How to have different facebook web address connect to the same page?
Hi i seen some huge website does that, even their facebook cover photos are different but they are all linking to the same page. one of the example is groupon. You can check their fan likes are the same across different web address such as Singapore and Malaysia. any idea guys?
Local SEO | | andrewwatson920 -
I'm starting an internet marketing company along with a newspaper company
I'm starting a project for a newspaper company where I just started working as the in-house SEO. I'll have ownership along with the newspaper for this new internet marketing company and could use some advice.Should I build our new site on the newspapers domain with good pr already or start a fresh site from square one. I'm trying to weigh out the pro's and cons and I'm still undecided.This news company has been around since the 50's and the trust is there. But just one sticky situation with an uneducated client could hurt the reputation of the newspaper.Your thoughts please!
Local SEO | | onetwotree0 -
Have you heard of any white hat methods for influencing Google's auto suggest/auto complete?
We have a client who has a "friend" who says he can get keyword phrases that include their business name to show up in Google's auto suggest when doing a search. We have not heard much about this and are skeptical to these claims as we know how Google comes up with these suggested keyword phrases. Wondering if anyone in the community heard much about tactics to influence auto suggest/auto complete and would like to know your opinion about it.
Local SEO | | CraigSDM0