Footer Links For Web Design Agencies - Bad?

[AdeLewis]

So today Google have updated their Webmaster Guidelines and they have drawn particular attention to their update relating to Link Schemes. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356

Unless you have had your eyes closed and your fingers in your ears since February then most people are aware of the types of link schemes that the updated is refering to but there is one area that isn't so black and white for me.

"Here are a few common examples of unnatural links that violate our guidelines: Widely distributed links in the footers of various sites"

We are a design agency and we design and build lots of websites for our clients. It is pretty standard practice for agencies to add a credit to the footer of websites and we pick up a lot of work from people that see a site that they like and click through the footer link to our site.

Our footer credit is standard on all of the websites that we create:-

Website by Teapot Creative

Only the 'Teapot Creative' part of the credit is anchor text so we are only linking using our brand name with no intention of manipulating search results.

Is this going to hurt us? or will the fact that we are only linking using our branded term and without any SEO intent keep us in the clear?

Thanks.
Ade.

[MatthewBarby]

Hi Ade,

Just thought I would chip in here.

Our website took a huge hit during the Penguin update for this (to the point where we now are moving the domain to a different one). The reason for this was that every website we made had footer text going to our website and they were all hosted on the same server, with the same blocks.

We removed nearly all of them and it seemed that the initial damage was too much to recover from. All of our websites were spam free and we only linked via branded keywords, so I think the IP issue is really important here.

We have made it standard practice from now on to set up all new sites on dedicated IP addresses.

Hope this is of some use.

Matt.

[AdeLewis]

Hi Kevin,

Thanks for your thoughts, I have spoken to several other SEO's and everyone seems to be of the opinion that we are pretty safe.

None of the websites that we have built are in any way spammy, they are generally business websites belonging to SMEs with, as you guessed, very few outbound links.

Your comment about IPblock is something that I hadn't considered. All of these sites are on our own server and so all have the same IP block.

Thanks again.
Ade.

[KevinBudzynski]

I think you hit the nail on the head -- the anchor text is a branded term with not much competition.  Also, the sites that you design probably do not have that many outbound links (much less spammy outbound links). Because of those 2 reasons, I think that you will continue to be fine (you could always put a no follow attribute on the link).

One thing to also consider is if  all the sites are on one IP block, it may be considered a link-farm and could hurt.

Would be interested in hearing other's opinion on this.