Wierd link

[VillasDiani]

We have recently receive linek from one website. The site is quite very powerful for the word we try to rank, however the link is kind of wired. This is how it looks like: http://villasdiani.com/?db

The webmaster of the site said that he ads (?db) on the end so as we would see on our analytics the traffic from his site..

Also the link is from footer...is this good or it does not have value

[VillasDiani]

Thank you very much Paul! His site http://dianibeach.com and our poor is http://villasdiani.com

Thank you so much for all this!

[ThompsonPaul]

Would you be willing to tell me his actual website, July? That way I could make a specific recommendation. (You can send it in a Personal Message through SEOMoz here if you'd rather not list it publicly - just click on my name, and on my profile page you'll see the Private Message button)

Paul

[VillasDiani]

Thank you so much Paul for the explanation! Unfortunately for me, the link is one every of his pages in the footer:-( so I guess it is pretty useless for our site ranking.

If I may ask one more question,  What would be the best way to give us good link from his site so as he he would not loose traffic  on us and we still get some value?

Thank you very much Paul!

[ThompsonPaul]

He's a little confused about the right way to tag a link so it can be found in Analytics properly, July, but what he's doing isn't going to hurt. You can see the visit in your Analytics as a referral from his site, whether he adds that extra bit or not.

A footer link isn't considered as powerful by the Search Engines as an editorial link from right within the page's content. In addition, if the footer link appears on all (or a large number) of his pages, it has even less power. (and too many of these kinds of site-wide links form too many different sites can get you in trouble for "unnatural links".

That answer your questions?

Paul

P.S. The proper way to do what he's doing to allow you to track the links form his site would be to use proper Google URL tagging parameters to create the link (in which case the link would look something like
http://villasdiani.com/?utm_source=his-website&utm_medium=footer-link&utm_campaign=campaign-name. This would let yo look up those links in the Traffic Sources -> Sources -> Campaigns section of Google Analytics. You can find lots of info on how this works by searching "using utm parameters to track links in Google Analytics".