SEOs and web developers frequently leave links to their site in the footer of their clients' sites. Does this negatively impact the site with the links?
-
Does this provide any SEO value to the receiving site? Has anyone experienced problems doing this?
-
Does this provide any SEO value to the receiving site?
No
Has anyone experienced problems doing this?
There are not any problems that can arise from this issue unless the target site which belongs to the SEO receives a penalty. If you stick with SEOs whom use only white hat techniques this should never be a problem.
Does this negatively impact the site with the links?
No. If you want to really look at this topic under a microscope then a very small amount of PR would flow from your site to the SEO's site. How small? If your site had 100 links per page and the PR flowed evenly to all links then we are talking about 1%. Google has inferred they devalue footer links so most likely it is a fraction of one percent.
If the SEO is doing their job well and you are pleased with their performance, I would suggest leaving the link. If you are unhappy with the SEO's performance and would not recommend their services, remove the link.
Personally, the link is something I discuss with clients upfront. I inform them exactly the words I shared in the above paragraph. If you are happy with me, leave the link and otherwise remove it.
-
I think it is a strategy which has been around pretty much since SEO started, I have seen this done for soo many years say the last 12.
I saw recently for a very strong term a site was over taken by a site that has 1/4 the total links of the top site, reason been the top site has say 1000+ and they place site wide footer links for a term on all these clients website.
It is obvious Google is aware of this practice and is de-value these types of links.
It is good for the company but I guess because they provide free advertising and also links back to their main website.
But it seems to hold some value, overall the best links are within content, near the top of the page on authority websites.
-
Hi
I believe that this practice is at best a little old hat and at worst has a negative effect on the client's site. On a homepage there will be links to deeper pages eg brands, categories, etc. It is through the homepage that juice will flow to these pages. If there are unnecessary outbound links on the homepage then this juice will be diluted, if only by a little. As the objective of an SEO is to optimise the clients page they really shouldn't post footer links. If they insist? then they should be no follow.
-
I have just had a look at the search results for the query "web design sheffield" which ranks as 48% keyword difficulty using the keyword difficulty tool.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?aq=f&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=web+design+sheffield
The No 2 results evoluted.net appears to have built most of it's links through footer links which suggests it does have value for SEO purposes.
I guess the concern is that the clients sites content is likely to be completely unrelated to the developers sites content, however, it is a legitimate relationship and the developer is simply being credited for their good work.
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
-
Other sites linking to our site through sitewide footers
Hello, We have other sites linking to our site through images in sitewide footers, resulting in a link from every page of each site. Those sites are not owned by us and they decided to link to us on their own. They usually link to us as their "sponsor" or "partner", sponsor as in sponsor of some event and partner as in we sometimes work together on joint initiatives. I've searched Moz forum and other articles, but haven't been able to find an answer to this question. We'd like to make sure Google doesn't consider it to be spammy and we don't get any sort of penalty. Should we ask them not to link to us through those images in a sitewide footer or ask them to simply add "nofollow"? We don't want to remove those links if they are not considered to be harmful and removing them will hurt our DA/PA.
Link Building | | marynau0 -
What will the SECOND link from a site do for me
Say I have an opportunity to get another link from a high authority site that has already linked an important article from me (a page I REALLY want to rank well). Now a month later, they are interviewing me and asking what I'd like to link. I have plenty of good content I can offer, but I really want that page they already linked to to climb a bit in the rankings. So my question is, how is that second link best spent? Would linking to the same page give it a boost? Or does Google see it as "oh. Another link from the same domain. Yippee." Would that link do more for a different page on my site at this point?
Link Building | | cbrant7770 -
How important are 'anchor' text links now
We have started building some good links but I'm just wandering how important anchor based text ones are now.
Link Building | | nick-name123
I'm not talking about spamming/going too heavy but a few here and there. What's your recent experience?0 -
SEO value of a 'Most Popular Stories' widget?
Hi there, I work for a theater and live performances publishing site. We write 15-20 quality articles per day on the New York City and national theater community. We show a "Most Read" stories widget on all of our pages, but click rates for these are really low - 1% of readers click to read a story from this. As such we're considering replacing this with higher-value content. My question, however, is this: Is there any SEO value in keeping this widget? I want to make sure we're taking this aspect into consideration. Thank you!
Link Building | | TheaterMania1 -
Site wide back links
Hi, One of our sites has a site-wide link from another site. So, Google sees 6700 pages from that site link to one of our pages. Is that something to be concerned about? The other site is http://www.daum.net/ We also have 2000 pages that blogspot.com links to us from. Both these sites have high domain authority, so I would hope all those links score well. But I certainly don't want to be penalized for links that appear spammy. Thank you in advance.
Link Building | | seotis0 -
When does Google Webmaster update your links to site??
Hi everyone We removed a load of links from a site over 2 months ago but they still show in Google webmaster tools. I understand Google will not be reading this links as they were removed so long ago. However I just was interested when Google might update these as not showing as linking to us anymore. I like to try and keep things tidy and its a bit frustrating it would be good to be 100% sure what Google is counting at any given time. Cheers James
Link Building | | tempowebdesign0 -
Is there way to identify all back links throughout a site or do I have to check one site page at a time? Thanks!
Sorry if it is obvious, but I can't seem to figure it out. I'd like to be able to run a report that will list all of the back links on every page of my site.
Link Building | | TRCCommunications0 -
SEO Tool to search mass URLs (for link qualification)
Hi, I have been using OSE and have a compiled list of backlinks to my competitor's sites. The next step would be to go through and qualify all of these links for a link opportunities for my client's site. To save me a lot of time, I require a tool that will search all of these pages (say 1000) for specific keywords in tags or body content. A search query might be - site:(URL list) intitle:directory site:(URL list) "add site" etc Any ideas would be great. Thanks.
Link Building | | DigitalLeaf0