Footer Links Question
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I work at a web development firm and we put site wide links in each of our clients footers (I know this is awful and I am in the process of changing this) that read "web design by, web development by, hosting by,,,etc". My question is, I am in the process of deleting the site wide links and just leaving the links on the home page, but 1. should I get rid of the links all together, that are on sites that have a pr:2 or lower? 2. should I change the footer links, so they aren't all the same text?
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Thanks for the great responses!
For now, I am going to do a rel="nofollow" for all of our clients and slowly over time, change the links,wording and dofollow of the text.
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Right now, it looks like your backlink anchor text profile is over-optimized for "website design" (that's the anchor text you're using in the site-wide footers).
As you already mentioned, I recommend removing the site-wide links. For the links you keep on the homepage, I also recommend using brand-related anchor text instead of money keywords (i.e., link with "BlueTone Media" instead of "Website Design").
You're using these links for branding purposes (so it makes sense to emphasize the brand), and if you use brand-related anchor text, you'll be much safer with respect to link-related search engine updates.
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I'd consider changing or removing those links ASAP.
Footer links have emerged as one of the primary reasons behind a Penguin penalty. If you have a whole host of site-wide do-follow exact-match external links, then you're running a pretty high risk of triggering a penalty.
So what can you do? You could change the anchor text, as you've mentioned, although I don't think that removes the risk all that much. In Google's eyes (not necessarily yours), it could still view external links that are do-follow and sitting in the footer to be trying to manipulate SEO performance and pass PageRank.
If you're doing it solely for advertising purposes, then I'd consider changing the text of the links and making all of them no-follow. I'd even consider removing the link but keeping the text. However nofollowing the links should be a clear enough indication to Google that you're doing it for advertising and not to manipulate organic search results.
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I definitely think you should keep your homepage links on all homepages you design. At the very least its good advertising. Traditionally, I have always had the same text link for my sites, but I recently read an article on this site that said to vary your text link based on the service you provide. So, if you designed a site for a real estate agent, your link would be " Real Estate Web Design by Your Company" I am in the process of modifying my inbound text links to reflect this. I hope this helps.
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