Is Sitewide Credit Link Good or Bad in 2015?
-
We are a web design agency thus we get a good number of links (footer) from our client's site. According to Matt Cutt, Google considers all the sitewide links to 1. So is it okay to have those links?
Note: Those links are do-follow and most with 2 anchor text. "Web Design" by "Company Name" and "Website Development" by."Company Name".
Thanks
-
Thanks for your info. May I get any reference?
-
unless its terms of service or privacy policy something to that affect. You will eat your crawl budget and Google has banned or frowned upon designers and developers getting links by putting it on client sites. Even though it is relevant it is still a no-no.
Hope this helps,
-
These links could be helpful or harmful. Google says that they don't like site-wide links, that they don't like keyword links. You can listen to Google or take your chances.
-
Yeah, my clients are okay with that. Cause we only put a link on the footer ones our client approve that. But the thing is, we develop the whole site. Not using wordpress or joomla. So either way, there will be 1 name and link.
-
Thanks for your Great information. Is it okay to put our brand name there with link without the keyword?
or simply just remove all the links from all the sites. Isn't that a bad idea? Cause 1. we'll lose a huge number of links. And 2. Deleting links which are not suspicious to google, might harm the site.
-
A lot of designers believe that these links drive business. The question is how much business do they drive away because website owners don't want keyword anchor text links in their footer. The design agency wants two anchor text links, the SEO wants his anchor text links, a logo person thinks he needs a link.
I believe that a lot of website owners, who have seen their friends, or maybe one of their own websites get whacked for penguin, unnatural link, etc. penalties and be sunk in the SERPs for over a year, are now either afraid enough or smart enough to realize that a bunch of site-wide, keyword, money term, do-follow, anchor text links in their footer isn't "best practice" for the owner of a website.
Can you name any SEOs who post intelligent content here at Moz who have two money-term, keyworded, site-wide, do-followed, anchor-text links in their footer pointing to a design agency?
Added: Just placing "Web Design by Egol" in the footer, without a link, may have positive SEO value. It is a mention of your brand with no link and visitors who see it and want to get in contact with you can simply search using those words.
-
Googles guidelines on link schemes covers this:
"Additionally, creating links that weren’t editorially placed or vouched for by the site’s owner on a page, otherwise known as unnatural links, can be considered a violation of our guidelines. Here are a few common examples of unnatural links that may violate our guidelines:
(scroll down the page a little bit)......
- Widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites"
In addition to Don's suggestion to review Cyrus' video, I would strongly recommend reviewing Google's guidelines on the subject. They aren't specifically saying links from a client site to yours, but it's pretty clear if you're putting a do-follow link to your site from a site you built for a client... that's a no-go since it was placed there by you and not editorially placed by your client.
-
HI Jubaer,
Last year, Cyrus Shepard did a White Board Friday and touched on this very subject.
REF: https://moz.com/blog/the-rules-of-link-building-whiteboard-fridayQuote: "...
Don't link externally in the footer
A couple of other rules that I see people violate all the time that Google has made painfully clear in the past few months: Don't link externally in the footer. Just don't. I'm not going to go into the reasons. Just don't do that.
Avoid site-wide links
By the same token, except for navigation, avoid site-wide links. This is something that we've known for years. If someone links to you externally, site-wide, in the side bar, that's ripe for Penguin-style links...."
The idea of linking to your site on every page is an old tactic used to generate higher DA / PA for the linked site. There is of course something to be said about a company that is proud of its work and is happy to put their name on it, but in general the idea of harvesting clients link juice in an effort to boost yours is a bit pretentious.
At best you get credit for 1 link on the site, at worst you move the bar towards getting a penalty for spamming.
My advice, if your clients are okay with it, pick a page like "about us" or "contacts" and put a small blurb, site powered By "WordPress" designed by YourDesignSite.com. This would be 2 external links and draw a correlation for scrapers between the CMS, the Keyword Design(ed) and Your site.
Hope this makes sense and helps,
Don
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
-
Dealing with the impending Google mobile compliance update - is bMobilized any good as a temporary measure?
We've been caught a bit off guard with the upcoming Google mobile compliance issue and received the warnings in webmasters about fixing mobile usability issues. It will still be some time before we can have the site re-coded as responsive. I have stumbled upon a converter tool (which turns any site into one that's mobile friendly) called bMobilized, which essentially turns your site into one that's mobile friendly. Have you used bMobilized? Is it a safe idea to use this service temporarily until our new responsive site is ready in a few months? Do you have any suggestions for temporarily getting around the mobile compliance issue while our new responsive site is being built? Thanks
Web Design | | Martin_S0 -
Too Many Links on One Page - What to Do?!
Hello Geniuses, Prodigies, and Experts of the Field, My website pages for www.1099pro.com have too many links on one page, something like 150-175, and I understand that each page should ideally be under 100. Most of these links, approx 105, come from dropdown navigation options in the header toolbar or the footer links. It is my take that these links make our site easier to navigate but I'm sure that they are hurting my pagerank / SERPs. Is there a best way to handle a situation like this? I'd really prefer not to alter the header/footer layout of the entire site by removing 50-75 navigational links. The only other idea I have is below but I have no idea if it would work. For any link that I do not care to pass pagerank, institute a "nofollow" parameter. This would be my favorite option if it is viable.
Web Design | | Stew2220 -
How to optimize SEO value of links in a calendar
Hi All- I am building a website about outdoor activities (cycling, kayaking, hiking, etc.). The site will most likely be built with either Joomla or Wordpress. A key piece of the site will be a calendar of upcoming events. The calendar will list the basic attributes of each event like date, time and location. However if an event has a webpage of it's own I will also include a link to that page in the details of the event. My question is: How can I create a calendar that will capitalize on the SEO value of the links included in the event descriptions? I've noticed many similar sites put events into a Google calendar and then embed the Google calendar into their webpage. In that situation would Google even see any external links included in the descriptions of the events? Thanks in advance for any input. -Chris
Web Design | | 1968Rouleur0 -
Linking to an image with the keyword in the title and alt tags.
Hi guys, Just thought I'd ask for opinions about an ecommerce catalog I'm working on. I don't know if it's even worth worrying about, but here's the scenario. Let's say I'm linking to a category called 'Sale' using an image, I have the title tag of the link as 'Sale', the image title is also 'Sale' as well as the alt tag. The HTML looks like this: Sale The page itself is: http://www.fashionbasicsonline.com/catDisplay So my question is, do you think I'm stuffing the keyword in too many times there? It's CMS driven so I could have the alt tag as 'Sale Products' or one of the titles as 'Sale Catalog' perhaps, do you think there would be a benefit in doing that? Maybe it's microoptimisation and I should be looking at other low hanging fruit, but I'm just trying to come up with the best scenario. Would love to hear what you think. Cheers, Bruce p.s. Looking forward to meeting as many people as possible at MozCon next week 🙂
Web Design | | bruce_werdschinski0 -
Over Optimization & Footer Links for Crediting Web Design to a Company
With the recent updates to the algorithm having to do with link networks and over optimization it has got me to thinking about the footer links we add to each site that we build and do web design for linking back to ours. I could certainly see how Google could make the assumption that these are all on the same server, pointing back to one main site, and penalize us for that. Should we no=follow these links? They may say something like, "Website Designed By: Company Name". They do provide a valuable source to some extent of traffic to the site from people interested in our designs. Any thoughts?
Web Design | | JoshGill270 -
Number of links per page?
I'm confused by the number of links that we should put on a page. Our site has a high domain authority but SEOmoz tool and others, plus Google WMT suggests much much less than other sites have - look at Dailymail.co.uk or the Huff post site for example. our site is www.worldtravelguide.net and I'm thinking specifically about the /destinations and each continent like /europe Our site has thousands of pages, trying to create an effective internal linking structure with the limitation of 150 or so links is nearly impossible and ends up with too many navigational pages. We were hit hard by Panda (even though all our content is original, professionally written frequently updated) in favour of bigger brands and considering Google suggests that sites should be designed for users and not SEO these two ideals conflict. Does anyone have any data on what the link limit is? Any other tips or observations would be gratefully received. Thanks, John
Web Design | | JohnFinlayson0 -
Keyword rich footer links negative effect
Based on bits and pieces of information I've read on SEOmoz, am I correct to state that:
Web Design | | Partouter
"Keyword-rich footer links effect pages negatively in terms of the keyword referenced in the anchor text?" This means footer links in Thanks in advance fellow Mozzers!0