Footer link back to developers domain

[LesleyPaone]

I have read a lot about where it is suggested to either not put an attribute link in the footer of a clients site or to no follow it. But I have a little bit different take on the question.

How does this work on a large scale? Are these manual penalties, or are they automatic? By large scale, I am talking about big cms programs such as Wordpress, Joomla, and the likes of those. They all have links back to their site in the footer of the default templates. Is this bad? Does it not rally matter on the scale of companies such as this?

[BeanstalkIM]

There are definitely sites that are (to quote George Orwell) "more equal than others".

Wordpress would be hooped is those types of links were catalysts to a penalty ... at least in a level world. I dont' think anyone could say with 100% certainty that it won't bite you in the butt so nofollow is probably the route to go.

[LesleyPaone]

I just wrote an answer to the post above, but the jist is not that it is an attribution link like so and so developed this site. It is more a default theme for a major software package. It might get 100k natural links in a month from having it in the footer. I would venture to guess it gets around 10k a month now from it.

[LesleyPaone]

I understand the thinking of that, but at the same time I am asking a question not about putting a link back on my clients pages. It has to do with the default theme of a major cms package. Something that might get 100k or so backlinks in a or two from people installing it.

After the whole pinterest thing, I think it is pretty obvious that Google has sites that they treat differently because of what ever reason. This might very well be one of those sites. Or I could be totally off base on this line of thinking.

I am just trying to figure out if a major default theme is going to suffer from not using a no-follow, or if it really does not matter per se.

[crackingmedia]

Hi Lesley

It would be good to hear from others on this, but I think that footer backlinks like these to the developer's site are largely ignored by Google these days in terms of passing SEO value.

For many web developers, adding a link like that has been a sort of credit to them, rather like have a credit at the end of a film. It's what web developers have done and many still do. I haven't heard of any web developer's sites being slapped by having multiple backlinks like this, so maybe Google does see it that way.

Peter

[BeanstalkIM]

As an SEo I never do it but that's more to the question, do I want to say, "Hey Google, here's a site that's been SEO'd."  From the perspective of a web designer simply taking credit for their work, I've only seen it cause issues recently if they're followed links and anchor heavy.  From my experience, branded links seem to work fine but mix it up.

That said, who knows what's coming.  If you want to play it safe - nofollow is the way to go.  But then, you probably knew that.