Is it negative to put a backlink into the footer's website of our clients ?
-
Hello there !
Everything is in the subject of this post but here is the context : we are a web agency and we, among others, build websites for our clients (most of them are shops). Until now, we put a link in their footer, like "developped by MyWebShop".
But we don't know if it is bad or not. With only one website we can have like hundred of backlinks at once, but is it good for SEO or not ? Will Google penalize us thinking that is blackhat practices ? Is it better to put our link in the "legal notices" or "disclaimer" part of the websites ?
What is the best practice for a lasting SEO ?
I hope you understand my question,
Thnak you in advance !
-
I asked a similar question to this here http://www.seomoz.org/q/site-wide-footer-links-or-single-website-credits-page and it has possibly useful answers. I'd be interested to hear your views on whether to: A) create site-wide footer links on all pages of my client sites (varying anchor) B) just create a "Website Credits" page and include this inthe sitemap C) create site wide footer links to the website credits page, and link from this back to my site I look forward to hearing your views...
-
I'm actually not sure I agree. From a theoretical, PageRank-passing perspective, sitewide links are better. From a penalty/risk perspective, 1000s of sitewide links can lead to a ton of links coming from very few unique domains, which can start to look suspicious. I actually think you might see less devaluation by limiting the footer links to a couple of strong pages on each client site.
-
Practically, I think Julie is right, but I have seen heavy devaluation of these footer links in the past year or two. They'll still count for something, but not a lot. The only warning I'd add is that I wouldn't create a situation where these are your ONLY links. You could risk looking like a link farm and even a potential penalty at that point. These easy links should be only one part of your link-building strategy.
I'd also highly encourage diversity. Mix up the anchor text, as long as it's relevant, and maybe even put the link different places. If you can get contextual links somehow (not footers or sidebars), that's a huge plus. The more you can mix it up, the better.
-
From a pure SEO perspective, it's better to have the link in the footer appearing on each page.
-
Speaking personally I'm not in favor of it but more from an appearance perspective. I've seen a lot of cases where this is abused by smaller operations who aren't taking their customer's overall outbound link profiles into account. We've inherited projects where the previous designer put about 100 words into the META author tag spamming his keywords, and then in addition put at least a paragraph of ALT text on his footer link. The client didn't even know it was there, or what it necessarily meant.
I also think it detracts from the appearance/professionalism of larger clients sites. I think personally I'm moving towards either very subtle and small center-footer links, with the full knowledge of the client, or a paragraph and link on the About US/Partners page. Note this is my opinion on what we're doing and not meant as an indictment of anyone else's practices.
-
Thanks for your "enlightenment"
I wonder if it wouldn't be better (on the pure seo perspective) to only put a link on the credit page for exemple ?
-
This is standard practice of almost all web design agencies. Giant blog platforms like Wordpress and Blogger also put in a credit link by default. The presence of a credit link like you described the footer will not hurt you in any way.
There is some debate about whether or not it will help you at all (I think it will -- footer links are greatly discounted, but still seem to count for something) but it won't hurt, and it makes sense from a branding/advertising perspective.
-
I know with Panda 3.3 update this past week, there has been some change to the way Google interprets back links. So, I'll be curious what the opinions of other people would be. Personally, I wouldn't put a link in the footer of client sites........just my opinion.....
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
-
Does Google checks the author name of the articles with backlinks to a website?
Hi, This may sound a little too suspicious; but just want to take your suggestions and experience in this. We are trying to create articles on third party websites to increase backlinks, our brand popularity and awareness about our features. If the same author is mentioned in multiple or tens of articles with backlinks to same website; will Google monitor the author name? Is there anything wrong in creating too many external articles with same author name? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vtmoz0 -
Increase in spammy links from image gallery websites i.e. myimagecollection.net
Hi there I've recently noticed a lot of spammy links coming from image gallery sites that all look the same, i.e.: http://mypixlibrary.co/ http://hdimagegallery.net/ http://myimagecollection.net/ http://pixhder.com/ Has anyone else seen links from these? They have no contact details, not sure if they are some form of negative SEO or site spam. Any ideas how to get rid? Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Kerry_Jones0 -
Backlink Question
I have a backlink on a very popular sports news site PR5 this is a sitewide link. The link is near the top on righthand side. As you scroll down, the page keeps loading more and more information. According to my Google webmaster tools the link is on the site over 21,400 pages. As the stories being submitted are new most of the pages have no PR however there are around 30-40 categories that have PR ranging from 0-4. According to my AHREFS account on a daily basis it picks up between 100-200 new links with on average around 10-20 being lost as the stories are being removed. Would anyone advise I just ask for my link to be on the category pages only or should I leave it as it is? Many Thanks in Advance for any Feedback.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | Palmbourne0 -
How did I get over 1000 backlinks in less then a month? help?
Hi Guys I'm a newbie and just started my website, im wondering if im reading this correctly, i use a tool called my seo tools and its telling me my website zenory.co.nz has over 1600 backlinks, this is scary since the site is only 5months old and i didn't see this till at least today and i check my sites backlinks on a regular basis. However when I check with moz it says I only have 2? I'm a little confused. Any advice here? Much appreciated Thanks
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | edward-may0 -
Hreflang/Canonical Inquiry for Website with 29 different languages
Hello, So I have a website (www.example.com) that has 29 subdomains (es.example.com, vi.example.com, it.example.com, etc). Each subdomain has the exact same content for each page, completely translated in its respective language. I currently do not have any hreflang/canonical tags set up. I was recently told that this (below) is the correct way to set these tags up -For each subdomain (es.example.com/blah-blah for this example), I need to place the hreflang tag pointing to the page the subdomain is on (es.example.com/blah-blah), in addition to every other 28 subdomains that have that page (it.example.com/blah-blah, etc). In addition, I need to place a canonical tag pointing to the main www. version of the website. So I would have 29 hreflang tags, plus a canonical tag. When I brought this to a friends attention, he said that placing the canonical tag to the main www. version would cause the subdomains to drop out of the SERPs in their respective country search engines, which I obviously wouldn't want to do. I've tried to read articles about this, but I end up always hitting a wall and further confusing myself. Can anyone help? Thanks!
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | juicyresults0 -
Advanced Outside Perspective Requested to Combat Negative SEO
**Situation: **We are a digital marketing agency that has been doing SEO for 6 years. For many years, we maintained exceptional rankings and online visibility.However, I suppose with great rankings comes great vulnerability. Last year, we became the target of a pretty aggressive and malicious negative SEO campaign from another other SEO(s) in our industry - I'm assuming they're competitors. Overnight, there were 10,000+ links built on various spam domains using the anchor text: negative marketing services poor seo butt crack kickass ... and more (see attached image) The issue we face are: Time Investment - Enormous investment of time and energy to contact each web admin for link removal. Hard to Keep Up - When we think we're getting somewhere, new links come out of the woodwork. Disavow Doesn't Work - Though we've tried to generally avoid the disavow tool, we've had to use it for a few domains. However, it's difficult to say how much effect, if any, it's had on the negative links. As you can imagine, we've seen an enormous drop in organic traffic since this all started. It's unfortunate that SEO has come to this point, but I still see a lot of value in what we do and hope that spammers don't completely ruin it for us one day. Moz Community - I come to you seeking some new insight, advice, similar experiences or anything else that may help! Are there any other agencies that have experienced the same issue? Any new ways to combat really aggressive negative SEO link building? Thanks everyone! UUPPplJ
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ByteLaunch0 -
Macrae's Blue Book Directory LIsting
Does anyone know more information about this directory? Is it a good quality directory that I should pay to get listed on?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | EcomLkwd0 -
Could this be negative SEO?
Hi, I've attached a copy of our Google ranking for one of our keywords for our site and a competitor. Also shown is the number of external links over time for the same 2 sites. There seems to be a striking resemblance between the 2 sites so could this be the result of negative SEO? What's the best way to determine whether you've been targeted for negative SEO? Thanks, site-analysis.jpg
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | AndyMediaLounge0