Self-Generated Backlinks Question
-
I'm kinda new to the whole backlinks thing. My company does website design and we have, historically, included a statement in the Footer of the websites stating "Website by Our Company" linking back to our own website.
Should we be NoFollowing these links? Are they hurting us in any way? Are there any best practices for this?
-
Yup, the requirement for these kinds of links is to use nofollow on them, Roger. They're worth leaving in place (assuming you have the clients' permission) for their potential referral value, but even without the nofollow, they'd have little SEO value anyway as Google heavily devalues sitewide footer links like that. Best to be safe from having them considered manipulative by making them nofollow.
If you want to add another layer of usefulness, add UTM tracking to the links so you can easily distinguish visitors from those links in your Analytics. That way you can assess how those visitors are performing once they reach your site. I'd actually recommend going one step further and creating a custom landing page that is specifically optimised for visitors you know have already seen a website you designed.
Make sense?
Paul
-
Hi Roger,
Assuming that link goes to a page in your website that shows your services and/or portfolio, it is perfect! Another option if it goes to the "about us" page...
Said that, you should have the permission of the owner.
Secondly, if it is a new domain, ie DA 1 and PA 1 you might consider a nofollow link. But, it is a guessing, I mean if in a matter of months that client climbs the sky in terms of DA and PA, you will not be happy by having that nofollow link.
On regard the foot links, I understand that is a rule mostly for websites having an structure of affiliates. In your case, it is part of your ecosystem, meaning almost all do the same in the industry of Website Developers Companies. Good luck!
Mª Verónica
Note: I had to edit, due to I misunderstood the question - thanks to Paul I got it.
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
-
To delete or not? That is the question..
In the case of an eCommerce store with a large catalogue of branded goods the inventory is constantly being adjusted as products become discontinued. Each year most fashion brands have 2 or 3 launches. At this same time they will delete some (not all) of previous years collections. Once we have sold through the remaining inventory of last season's products the question is how to proceed? a) delete products to avoid customers landing on page, then only to be disappointed when product is no longer available to purchase.. b) keep products however mark as discontinued / no longer available and show a link to a similar product if applicable.. I am coming around to the opinion that b) provides a better user experience. However will this growing catalogue of old products (pushed to bottom of category page) help keep content of site full and have SEO advantages? If this is the case then that helps confirm b) as best choice??
Web Design | | seanmccauley0 -
A question about title tag when the page has 2 services.
Hi all, Assuming a company has two services: SEO and PPC. Here is the situation: I would like to focus on SEO for now but also don't want to leave my PPC service out of the page. SEO accounts for 60% of the content, while PPC accounts for 40%. Assuming the content (SEO + PPC) of the page will not change, which title tag would you prefer, and why? SEO | brand name (Is it appropriate that the title focus on SEO but the content of the page contains PPC) SEO | PPC | brand name (Will the keywords dilute each other?) SEO | SEM Agency | brand name (The idea behind it is that SEM includes SEO and PPC so I think Google would be OK with the page ranking for SEO and also including PPC in the content. I really appreciate your help and explanation. Thank you!
Web Design | | Raymondlee0 -
URL & Link Hierarchy - juice flow direction from backlinks?
Our site is very regional, so we focus all of our seo efforts on each of these region landing pages. For Example: domain.com/toys/us/ca/san-francisco We added an informational page (ex. reviews) and gave it a url like this: domain.com/toys/us/ca/san-francisco/reviews Question: Will external backlinks to domain.com/toys/.../reviews provide any link juice value to it's hierarchical parent page: domain.com/toys/us/ca/san-francisco?
Web Design | | 42Floors0 -
To Genesis or not to Genesis that is the question
Hi everyone, i know this subject has been raised few times in the past, but i wanted to reach out to the community and find out what is your take on the advantages and disadvantage (if any) for using the Genesis Framework when building a new websites for Clients. I know for fact that many developers are complaining that they find it harder to manage the Genesis Framework, which i do appreciate has a bit more of comparability issues when it comes to plugins and modifications, but i always looked at it as a positive rather then a negative. My personal opinion is that Genesis framework is more of a stable Skeleton that is better read by Search Engine (from a technical SEO point view) and is harder for hackers to penetrate. Would have love to hear the community experts opinion pros and cons. Cheers. Dan
Web Design | | artdivision0 -
Schema question
What if an info, like an address, is not visible in my content but I would like Google to know the address through a schema markup like the following sample? Is it ok with Google and their guidelines? , , Here's what Google says from this link https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/1093493?hl=en&topic=1724124&ctx=topic though it is quite confusing for me: "In general, Google won't display any content in rich snippets that is not visible to human user. It can be tempting to add all the content relevant for a rich snippet in one place on the page, mark it up, and then hide the entire block of text using techniques like display:none, value-title, css etc. Don't do it! Google will ignore content that isn't visible to human users, so you should mark up the text that visitors will see on your web pages." Is it ok if the content is not visible to users but included in a meta tag? Thanks in advance!
Web Design | | esiow20130 -
Question on Breadcrumb and Canonical
Hi SEOmozers, I have another question. =] Thanks in advance. First question: How important is the breadcrumb for SEO? I know that breadcrumb makes better UX because it shows how the visitor landed on this page and the breadcrumb may show up in the search engine. But other than that, how important is it? Second Question: If I have a page that can be found via 2 locations, how should I handle this in regards to breadcrumb? For example, I have page A. You can access page A via Category A and Category B. Therefore, what I did was list Page A under Category A and when someone visit Category B and click on Page A, it will redirect to the page A that was found via Category A. The problem is on page A, the breadcrumb is Home > Category A > Page A. So if someone visit Category B and click on Page A, it redirects and the breadcrumb shows Home > Category A > Page A. What should I do with the breadcrumb for Category B > Page A? Should I create another page A and just use canonical on it? Should I create another page A but do not index it? or leave it as is? 1 Page A, can be access via 2 categories. Please advise. Thank you!
Web Design | | TommyTan0 -
TOP 5 Questions I Should Ask a web designer or developer?
I want to redesign my website to work better with SEO and crawls. I need to make sure I hire a good designer/developer but I don't have a ton of money to spend. What are the top 5 questions I should ask a web designer/developer to ensure they are good designers and have successfully implemented SEO??...or at least a site that is crawled well and has some SEO built in.
Web Design | | CapitolShine0 -
H1 image replacement question
Working with content folks on a new section of our website. Developed a new logo for this section of the site, and they want to incorporate the style of it into all of the page headings. The only way to pull this off is to use images for H1's. (Without getting into unnecessary detail, they have to be images - too precise to try text over background images.) I made everyone aware of the importance of H1 text for SEO purposes, but they really want these images. When I first attempted SEO back in 2003, I recall doing a site using CSS image replacement along these lines: Widget Page #example {
Web Design | | c2g
background: url(../images/example.gif) no-repeat;
text-indent: -5000px;
} That was nearly 10 years ago, and they definitely ranked for the H1s at the time which led me to believe it worked. Anyone know if this is considered an acceptable practice today? I read some other threads about enclosing the image in tags and relying on the ALT text, but that doesn't seem to be a good option.0