Do web design footer links of websites you build have value?
-
Hi everyone.
I am trying to build up DA for my site and create linking opportunities with my clients sites but I am not seeing any link value.
I just did a redesign with another firm and we built out www.denbow.com . We have links to our sites in the footer but for some reason it's not being indexed.
Can someone help me understand if it is good to put built by a href link in the footer? I've built almost 12 sites in my first 1.5 years of being in business for myself and I thought the links would pass some sort of value.
Thanks in advance for the help and education.
Regards,
Noob Gary
-
Powerful statement. Question everything and I like the statement. I want to keep learning and I want to do White hat principles for my clients to raise their DA and ultimately get found.
-
EGOL,
I appreciate you taking a stand on the position and question raised. I guess it all comes down to competition. I have only had my website and marketing business for two years. My competition has been doing this since 2010. They have a ton of the footer links coming back to their site which helps their DA which is presently a 34. If this helps them, why can't it work to help my DA while showing off my work?
I just wan to know what is right, so I don't do anything spammy but I can tell, my frustration with getting found is already putting me on the slippery slope of cutting corners.
G
-
Also just remember even hunters get lost in the forest, knowledge is a quest not an end result.
Question everything
-
Like I posted below, the CIMC is a digital marketing conference which MOZ is attending as an exhibitor. They have four links in their footer no of which are no follow.
Does this mean they are wrong?
They are rel="external" . Is that considered best practice?
G
-
Just so you know... there are people out there who will adamantly disagree with me.
When I post here, I am saying what I would do with my own websites.
If I was the web designer I would not use these links. If I was the web design client I would not want those links on my website.
-
Thanks for that,
Yes I've been under the impression that any external link in a footer is going to be looked at questionably by google, especially if it's promotional in nature. Since it can indicate a paid link.
I've watched a few competitors using that same tactic to increase their overall DA for freshsite starting, they 1st ranked great and quickly dropped for various keywords relating to that link placed.
Thanks again EGOL & Gary
-
Hi Deacyde,
I'm talking about the Website Designed By Constructiv Works type URL. It's purpose was two fold, one of which I have learned is bad. 1. it is to allow people who are looking at the site, if they like it, find me in the footer and come to my site. 2. To provide link value like almost every other site I have now reviewed.
Here's one I came across this morning with multiple URL's. http://digitalbuzz.ca/
How is this site any different? Denbow.com
"sometimes I think I know what I am doing...other times I feel like a child lost in the forest..."
-
My comments are related to a situation like this.
Egol.com is a webdesign business and designs a website for CarSeller.com. Egol.com puts links in the footer of CarSeller.com that point to his own website at Egol.com.
In my opinion, those links are manipulative if their anchor text is Egol.com and they are not nofollowed.
If they have anchor text of "Dallas Web Design" then that is really spammy.
-
Are we talking about navigational urls in footers? The kind say a CMS will naturally place there?
Or is this about external sites, which I completely understand, I don't understand how navigational menus in the footer, say of the most popular pages on the site could be considered manipulation or a scheme.
I understand the original poster ( Gary ) is speaking of his site's url on domains he designs in the footer, but now this talk has me wondering the wording of google.
Thanks for the further clarification.
-
Hi EGOL,
I consider myself a white hat SEO person but I honestly didn't know about this. So am I a "good designer" probably not because I didn't know and everyday I am learning. I am working on trying to build out better and better sites with good design and UX.
However, am I someone who wants to learn from mistakes and improve? Yes, yes I can definitively tell you I am.
Thanks for the slap on the wrist and telling me to get my stuff together. Also, thanks for sharing the information so I can get better...
G
-
Designers want those links for their ranking value. That is manipulative intent.
Any good designer should know that Google dislikes site-wide footer links and links placed with manipulative intent. They should also know about nofollow.
These kinds of links will never be on one of my websites.
-
Gotcha. That makes sense and yet I am hoping that people in this person's network are looking for a webdesigner then they will click on and find me. But if that is spammy, I will remove it.
Didn't even think this was not good practice... almost two years in and still learning about the moving target.
Thanks again.
G
-
GOOGLE: "Here are a few common examples of unnatural links that may violate our guidelines:"
- Widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites
These links are "manufactured" for the purpose of manipulating the search engines. That is exactly why a lot of web design firms place them in the footer of their client's websites.
**you are spammy if you put a link in the footer to your site? Is that correct? **
It's not spammy if you nofollow the link. That removes the manipulation.
You could add "Web design by Egol.com" to the footer in unlinked text and that brand mention might be helpful for your rankings without it being a link.
-
Thanks EGOL.
So if your a webdesigner and you built a site for a client, you are spammy if you put a link in the footer to your site? Is that correct?
Gary
-
According to Google it is a link scheme. If the anchor text is keyword optimized then it is also linkspam.
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
-
What domain name do you think is better for SEO: sirocco-webdesign.com or sirocco-web-design.com?
Hello, I would appreciate it very much if you share with me your thoughts on what domain name I'd better pick out in terms of productive SEO: sirocco-webdesign.com or sirocco-web-design.com? I know hyphens are not good, but second domain looks better, I think.
Technical SEO | | kirupa0 -
To merge website and blog?
I was hoping to get a bit of advice if possible. Our website has a domain authority of 25. Our blog, on a separate platform has a domain authority of 73. In essence, we were wondering if we should move all the content from our blog to our website and then set up redirects? What's stopped us so far is the fear that the links from the blog, with the higher domain authority, are having a positive effect on the website, and if we were to move the content we'd lose the value of those backlinks. So I was wondering if you could possibly advise me on the matter? Any help would be much appreciated. Thanks
Technical SEO | | Stone_Junction0 -
Google not indexing my website
Hi guys, We have this website http://www.m-health-expo.nl/ but it is not indexed by google. In webmaster tools google says that it can not fetch the site due to the robots.txt but i do not see any faults in it. http://www.m-health-expo.nl/robots.txt Do you see something strange, it really bothers me.
Technical SEO | | RuudHeijnen0 -
Should I promote each section of my website
Hi, i have a magazine website and i have been heavily promoting the main page of the site thinking that all the work i am doing for the main page which includes links and so on would then pass onto the rest of my site but i have a feeling this is not correct. Can anyone let me know if i should be concentrating on each section of the site and also on my articles should i be promoting these articles or let the search engines pick them up. I already use facebook and twitter to promote new articles but i would like to know if i should be doing more than this
Technical SEO | | ClaireH-1848860 -
Internal Linking
Where is the best information on internal linking. I'm so confused and everything I read says something different. Ahhhh Thanks
Technical SEO | | meardna770 -
Which version of pages should I build links to?
I'm working on the site www.qualityauditor.co.uk which is built in Moonfruit. Moonfruit renders pages in Flash. Not ideal, I know, but it also automatically produces an HTML version of every page for those without Flash, Javascript and search engines. This HTML version is fairly well optimised for search engines, but sits on different URLs. For example, the page you're likely to see if browsing the site is at http://www.qualityauditor.co.uk/#/iso-9001-lead-auditor-course/4528742734 However, if you turn Javascript off you can see the HTML version of the page here <cite>http://www.qualityauditor.co.uk/page/4528742734</cite> Mostly, it's the last version of the URL which appears in the Google search results for a relevant query. But not always. Plus, in Google Webmaster Tools fetching as Googlebot only shows page content for the first version of the URL. For the second version it returns HTTP status code and a 302 redirect to the first version. I have two questions, really: Will these two versions of the page cause my duplicate content issues? I suspect not as the first version renders only in Flash. But will Google think the 302 redirect for people is cloaking? Which version of the URL should I be pointing new links to (bearing in mind the 302 redirect which doesn't pass link juice). The URL's which I see in my browser and which Google likes the look at when I 'fetch as Googlebot'. Or those Google shows in the search results? Thanks folks, much appreciated! Eamon
Technical SEO | | driftnetmedia0 -
Amazon s3 links
Hello, Dose anyone has experience with Amazon s3 ? Hosting images, site elements and static files (pdf etc) on Amazon S3 bucket can influence the link structure / juice ? (by having external links to the amazon s3 bucket / account). If you host all the site images and site resources with Amazon S3 will all those "links" count as outgoing external links ? Is it worst then having everything linking internally ? Dose anyone knows if that can hurt you ? Personally I was not able to test it and I am sure I can't test it in the near future. Hope someone has and I can skip some steps with this. Thanks !
Technical SEO | | eyepaq1 -
Website has been penalized?
Hey guys, We have been link building and optimizing our website since the beginning of June 2010. Around August-September 2010, our site appeared on second page for the keywords we were targeting for around a week. They then dropped off the radar - although we could still see our website as #1 when searching for our company name, domain name, etc. So we figured we had been put into the 'google sandbox' sort of thing. That was fine, we dealt with that. Then in December 2010, we appeared on the first page for our keywords and maintained first page rankings, even moving up the top 10 for just over a month. On January 13th 2011, we disappeared from Google for all of the keywords we were targeting, we don't even come up in the top pages for company name search. Although we do come up when searching for our domain name in Google and we are being cached regularly. Before we dropped off the rankings in January, we did make some semi-major changes to our site, changing meta description, changing content around, adding a disclaimer to our pages with click tracking parameters (this is when SEOmoz prompted us that our disclaimer pages were duplicate content) so we added the disclaimer URL to our robots.txt so Google couldn't access it, we made the disclaimer an onclick link instead of href, we added nofollow to the link and also told Google to ignore these parameters in Google Webmaster Central. We have fixed the duplicate content side of things now, we have continued to link build and we have been adding content regularly. Do you think the duplicate content (for over 13,000 pages) could have triggered a loss in rankings? Or do you think it's something else? We index pages meta description and some subpages page titles and descriptions. We also fixed up HTML errors signaled in Google Webmaster Central and SEOmoz. The only other reason I think we could have been penalized, is due to having a link exchange script on our site, where people could add our link to their site and add theirs to ours, but we applied the nofollow attribute to those outbound links. Any information that will help me get our rankings back would be greatly appreciated!
Technical SEO | | bigtimeseo0