Footer sitewide links
-
Here's a question - does having a "website designed by" reference in the footer of every page of one of your clients help or hurt? I have a major university .edu that I designed a site for one of their departments and it is just about to launch and they've allowed me to put a reference in the footer.
I've had pretty good luck with this on my other clients' sites, but didn't know if this practice is seen as spammy.
Thanks
-
Can't hurt, although I think it would look more 'natural' to get a link from just one page (even if footer), ideally a hiuh-level page.
-
Chas,
In general having the same kind of links coming to your site does make your backlink profile less organic and Google will probably devalue some of them. Also, Google in general devalues footer links.
There are 12 types of links: (http://www.stuntdubl.com/2006/08/21/link-types/ here is a link to a blog post by stuntdubl) This post was published in 2006, so I would add social media links to it, but other than that the info is good.
- Authority links
- Directory links
- Reciprocal links
- Run of site links
- One way links from friends or related sites
- Edu and .Gov links
- Radio station, television, magazine, or newspaper links
- Press release links
- Article bio links
- RSS/ Blog aggregated links
- Comment and Profile Links
- Presell Page Links
If 90% of your links coming to your site are run of site links at the bottom of your page, you could probably benefit from diversifying your blacklinks. Read through the post and start coming up with some strategies to get different types of links to your site. One idea is to change a couple of your run of site links to a Presell Page Links. This could help you get some more value out of the run of site links, IF majority of the links coming to your site are run of site links.
However, that being said I would take any kind of .edu link that I could get.
I hope this helps,
Cyle
-
While I don't think it's the BEST possible link you could hope for, I don't see how this could hurt at all. I know that a huge portion of the "Free Themes/Layouts" community is based on the principle that giving out free work helps to build rankings via those links in the footer. Since the university is kosher with you doing it, I would jump at the chance.
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
-
Spammy sites that link to a site
Hello, What is the best and quickest way to identify spammy sites that link to a website, and then remove them ( google disavow?) Thank you dear Moz, community - I appreciate your help 🙂 Sincerely, Vijay
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | vijayvasu0 -
Multiple sitewide (deep)links devalued by Google?
In my experience sitewide links can still be very powerful if used sensibly and in moderation. However, I'm finding that sitewide text blocks with 2 or 3 (deep)links to a single domain appear not to be working that well or not at all in raising the authority of those target pages. Anyone having the same experience? In your experience, is the link value diminished when there are multiple deeplinks to a single domain in a sitewide text area? Is anything more than 1 link per target domain bad? Or could it even be that it's not so much the number of deeplinks to a single domain that matter, but purely the fact that they are sitewide "deeplinks"? Are sitewide deeplinks treated differently than sitewide links linking to an external homepage? Very interested in hearing your personal experience on this matter. Factual experience would be best, but "gut feeling" experience is also appreciated 🙂 Best regards, Joost
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | JoostvanVught0 -
'Nofollow' footer links from another site, are they 'bad' links?
Hi everyone,
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | romanbond
one of my sites has about 1000 'nofollow' links from the footer of another of my sites. Are these in any way hurtful? Any help appreciated..0 -
Fastest Way To Remove Footer Link? (post-Panda)
Hello, I have a website with 1k+ links pointed directly to an inner page and home page from blogspot domains. There are 3 links in the footer that points to different locations. 1st anchor text points to the person who designed the page template and links to their website (this doesn't affect us) 2nd anchor text uses a direct keyword that I am trying to rank for and links to the inner page. 3rd anchor text uses my website name and links to the home page I know that these are not good links and the content inside the pages are irrelevant to my own website. The links are embedded into the template on the footer and is site wide.I have already contacted the designer and have the links removed but those that have downloaded the templates still have the footer link. What would be the best way to remove all these footer links? Trying to contact each individual person who is using the template is not working out as most have not responded and some of the websites have not seen an update in years! Any thoughts? If you need additional information feel free to send me a direct message so I can send you an exact link.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
Do I even bother to remove links
Hi, I'm noticing increasing numbers of scraped directory links pointing back to the websites I manage. Much of this info appears to be scraped from a well known (and respected) directory. I don't build links to an of the websites I manage - and none have more than 200 linking root domains currently - not that many. The problem is I focus on quality links and the scraped links are incredibly weak on the whole. Diluting the quality links. I've noticed a certain paranoia in the SEO community about removing / disavowing links, and yet I'm tempted to ignore the rubbish (unless part of a major negative SEO push) and just get on with the job, focusing on quality content that drives natural links, and social media work.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | McTaggart0 -
Internal Links not being Identified on OSE
Greetings Mozzers, When ever I check my home page on OSE it says I have a total of 5 internal links. Obviously this is WAY off. I've used all relative links, if I were to removed all relative and make them absolute, would there be a better chance of OSE identifying them instead of losing that juice? I think this is huge to resolve as when I compare my site to competitors, almost all factors are in our favor except this huge gap of only 5 internal links. I'm using Drupal CMS. For example, Drupal normally outputs internal links as "/about" and "/about/team" in the menus. If we changed it to "https://monsterweb.net/about", and "https://monsterweb.net/about/team", would that make a difference? Thanks for all the advice and clarification on this matter.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | MonsterWeb280 -
Should I remove paid links?
I recently added about 20 paid links from directories but have since seen a 10% drop in traffic. I did also delete about 1000 pages of content that had no inbound links and were duplicated on other sites on the web and replaced the content with new content supplied by a client but still duplicated on other sites on the web, old URLs no longer valid or linked to, new content on new URLs. Assuming the drop in traffic had nothing to do with the content change mentioned above, should I remove the paid links in an attempt to recover? I don't think the old content was bringing in much traffic as it appeared elsewhere on more authoritive sites than mine.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Mulith0 -
Google, Links and Javascript
So today I was taking a look at http://www.seomoz.org/top500 page and saw that the AddThis page is currently at the position 19. I think the main reason for that is because their plugin create, through javascript, linkbacks to their page where their share buttons reside. So any page with AddThis installed would easily have 4/5 linbacks to their site, creating that huge amount of linkbacks they have. Ok, that pretty much shows that Google doesn´t care if the link is created in the HTML (on the backend) or through Javascript (frontend). But heres the catch. If someones create a free plugin for wordpress/drupal or any other huge cms platform out there with a feature that linkbacks to the page of the creator of the plugin (thats pretty common, I know) but instead of inserting the link in the plugin source code they put it somewhere else, wich then is loaded with a javascript code (exactly how AddThis works). This would allow the owner of the plugin to change the link showed at anytime he wants. The main reason for that would be, dont know, an URL address update for his blog or businness or something. However that could easily be used to link to whatever tha hell the owner of the plugin wants to. What your thoughts about this, I think this could be easily classified as White or Black hat depending on what the owners do. However, would google think the same way about it?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | bemcapaz0