Sitewide links and ways round it

[themegroup]

Hi there. I'm just re-reading The Art of SEO to ensure we have everything in place for our own website relaunch, and there was something that left me slightly confused with regards to sitewide links.

As a web design company, a lot of our links come from sitewides on client websites, currently in the pages' footer region.

Would these count as sitewide links, and would varying the target page and/or anchor text make these links count for more and be less of a red flag?

Alternatively, is there a way we can get credit from the sites we have designed without running the risk of having our links marked down or ignored altogether by the search engines?

(As an aside, it doesn't seem to have affected us so far, although it is obvious that only a small percentage of the inbound links are passing any real value - again, is this something we can rectify somehow?)

[themegroup]

Thanks for your prompt reply - it pretty much confirmed what I thought. As far as the footprint goes, that's not too much of an issue - we have all the clients listed on our site anyway, so it's no huge drama for people to find this out. Also, we don't work with anyone we would be happy to shout about.

Something on the About Us, or possibly the news page for new sites, could be doable. I guess the only thing that caused confusion was the paragraph in the book that implied the authors' experiments showed differing location pages and anchor text throughout the site was treated somewhat nearer linear instead of being ignored.

[MaryAnneG]

If they're footer links on the entire site, then they ARE sitewide links.  Part of the problem is, how is Google (or Bing, or any other SE) to know that they're your clients and not paid links or your own little private link network (which they are ... sort of)?  That's why the links don't pass much value.

Aside from the SEO implications, It also gives people the ability to "footprint" your entire client list. That may or may not be something you want.

If your clients are really happy with your work, and it wouldn't be out of character with the web site, they might be amenable to giving you a "shout out" somewhere else on the site or perhaps a mention on the "About us" page.