Is Sitewide Credit Link Good or Bad in 2015?
-
We are a web design agency thus we get a good number of links (footer) from our client's site. According to Matt Cutt, Google considers all the sitewide links to 1. So is it okay to have those links?
Note: Those links are do-follow and most with 2 anchor text. "Web Design" by "Company Name" and "Website Development" by."Company Name".
Thanks
-
Thanks for your info. May I get any reference?
-
unless its terms of service or privacy policy something to that affect. You will eat your crawl budget and Google has banned or frowned upon designers and developers getting links by putting it on client sites. Even though it is relevant it is still a no-no.
Hope this helps,
-
These links could be helpful or harmful. Google says that they don't like site-wide links, that they don't like keyword links. You can listen to Google or take your chances.
-
Yeah, my clients are okay with that. Cause we only put a link on the footer ones our client approve that. But the thing is, we develop the whole site. Not using wordpress or joomla. So either way, there will be 1 name and link.
-
Thanks for your Great information. Is it okay to put our brand name there with link without the keyword?
or simply just remove all the links from all the sites. Isn't that a bad idea? Cause 1. we'll lose a huge number of links. And 2. Deleting links which are not suspicious to google, might harm the site.
-
A lot of designers believe that these links drive business. The question is how much business do they drive away because website owners don't want keyword anchor text links in their footer. The design agency wants two anchor text links, the SEO wants his anchor text links, a logo person thinks he needs a link.
I believe that a lot of website owners, who have seen their friends, or maybe one of their own websites get whacked for penguin, unnatural link, etc. penalties and be sunk in the SERPs for over a year, are now either afraid enough or smart enough to realize that a bunch of site-wide, keyword, money term, do-follow, anchor text links in their footer isn't "best practice" for the owner of a website.
Can you name any SEOs who post intelligent content here at Moz who have two money-term, keyworded, site-wide, do-followed, anchor-text links in their footer pointing to a design agency?
Added: Just placing "Web Design by Egol" in the footer, without a link, may have positive SEO value. It is a mention of your brand with no link and visitors who see it and want to get in contact with you can simply search using those words.
-
Googles guidelines on link schemes covers this:
"Additionally, creating links that weren’t editorially placed or vouched for by the site’s owner on a page, otherwise known as unnatural links, can be considered a violation of our guidelines. Here are a few common examples of unnatural links that may violate our guidelines:
(scroll down the page a little bit)......
- Widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites"
In addition to Don's suggestion to review Cyrus' video, I would strongly recommend reviewing Google's guidelines on the subject. They aren't specifically saying links from a client site to yours, but it's pretty clear if you're putting a do-follow link to your site from a site you built for a client... that's a no-go since it was placed there by you and not editorially placed by your client.
-
HI Jubaer,
Last year, Cyrus Shepard did a White Board Friday and touched on this very subject.
REF: https://moz.com/blog/the-rules-of-link-building-whiteboard-fridayQuote: "...
Don't link externally in the footer
A couple of other rules that I see people violate all the time that Google has made painfully clear in the past few months: Don't link externally in the footer. Just don't. I'm not going to go into the reasons. Just don't do that.
Avoid site-wide links
By the same token, except for navigation, avoid site-wide links. This is something that we've known for years. If someone links to you externally, site-wide, in the side bar, that's ripe for Penguin-style links...."
The idea of linking to your site on every page is an old tactic used to generate higher DA / PA for the linked site. There is of course something to be said about a company that is proud of its work and is happy to put their name on it, but in general the idea of harvesting clients link juice in an effort to boost yours is a bit pretentious.
At best you get credit for 1 link on the site, at worst you move the bar towards getting a penalty for spamming.
My advice, if your clients are okay with it, pick a page like "about us" or "contacts" and put a small blurb, site powered By "WordPress" designed by YourDesignSite.com. This would be 2 external links and draw a correlation for scrapers between the CMS, the Keyword Design(ed) and Your site.
Hope this makes sense and helps,
Don
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
-
Which links to map across in site redesign
Hi there, I'm currently doing a fairly major website redesign for a client. They are moving to my hosting so I am creating the site on my cloud account and have edited my host files to work on it. The site structure will stay largely the same as it is quite a straightforward services site. However I'm moving them onto Wordpress from a different set up and I'm not sure how many of the links that they have, that aren't straight forward pages, I need to create redirects for. I have used Screaming Frog to get a list of all their URLs, of which there are 82. However alongside text/ html links I have: image/jpeg text/css
Web Design | | Frog-Marketing
application/javascript Do I need to create redirects for all of these link types? Or just any of the pages I'm not using? Many thanks, Sarah.0 -
'Security error' for links accessed via Facebook on Android phones
Hi, This is not strictly a SEO/inbound marketing question, so please excuse me for that--- but I think this awesome community could certainly help 🙂 We recently migrated a client website to https (SSL from Godaddy; the hosting provider is a different one). All that went fine. The problem though is that when a link from the website is shared on Facebook or sent via Whatsapp, and a user tries to open the page on any Android device, it throws up a Security Error. On the Facebook app, it doesn't allow the user to go any further. It seems that this problem is not unique and many others have raised it in various forums -- we've tried many of the options mentioned; have tried to work with Godaddy support as well ---- but the problem persists. Any solution(s)/fixes will be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Manoj
Web Design | | ontarget-media0 -
How is Single Page Application (SPA) bad for SEO
Hi guys. I am quite inspired of SPA technique. It's really amazing when all your interaction with the site is going on the fly and you don't see any page reloads. I've started implementing the site with this instruction and already found nice guys to make the design. The only downside of the using SPA which I can see **is the **SEO part. That's because the URL does not really change and different pages don't have their unique URL addresses.
Web Design | | Billy_gym
Actually they have, but it looks like: yoursite.com/#/products yoursite.com/#/prices yoursite.com/#/contact So all of them goes after # and being just anchors. For Google this mean all of these pages is just yoursite.com/ My question is what is really proven method to implement the URL structure in Single Page Application, so all the pages indexed by Google correctly (sorry I don't mention the other search engines because of market share). The other question, of course, is examples. It will be great to see real life site examples, better authority sites, which use SPA technique and well indexed by search engines.1 -
Are there any hard rules about internal linking of homepage?
Hi all, Usually we link homepage from all pages. That's definitely a boost for homepage to rank well. Do we need to interlink homepage to the highest? Including links from subdomains or sub directories. Thanks
Web Design | | vtmoz0 -
Force SSL. Good or Bad?
My website can be accessed with a number of different URL's and I am trying to consolidate the traffic to one point. Is there any problem, SEO or technical, with forcing all users who come to my site to going to our https domain? I have already set a preferred domain in WebMaster Tools and set rel=canonical for each page. For instance, anyone entering the below sites would be forced to land at https://www.1099pro.com. 1099pro.com www.1099pro.com http://1099pro.com http://www.1099pro.com
Web Design | | Stew2220 -
My site build in HTML has been badly hit this recent update and I have been toying on the idea of changing it to Wordpress
My site build in HTML has been badly hit this recent update and I have been toying on the idea of changing it to Wordpress. Would this help in my rankings? It seems the hit came only that last 2-4 days when business become much quieter. Frankly i have no idea on why the site fell in ranking all of a sudden. Been comparing to competitors and even a friend in the same industry and nothing makes sense so far (link profile, DA, PA etc) This site has been ranking well for 3 years prior to this. 2. My site has loads of content and visitors arrive from various landpages. But by changing it wordpress, the url of most of them would probably change. What should i do? 301 redirect all of them or is there a better method?
Web Design | | rester0 -
Best strategy for multiple internal links
We have a website that has a whole heap of internal links. After re-structuring the footer links to the main categories we are now looking at the best way to display the internal links from each category (approx 20-50 links from each). At present they are simply listed on the corresponding category page, however this doesnt look great so we want to display them in a way that is user friendly and also seo friendly. Any suggestions and examples appreciated. Thanks in advance.
Web Design | | Silkstream0 -
I know frames aren't good, but are they bad?
About 3/4 of my website includes frames from the Amazon aStore, but the pages also have at least 500 words of content on them each. I understand that spiders aren't too good with frames but will search engines punish my site for having them or just disregard them? Thanks in advance.
Web Design | | Max_powers0