SEOs and web developers frequently leave links to their site in the footer of their clients' sites. Does this negatively impact the site with the links?
-
Does this provide any SEO value to the receiving site? Has anyone experienced problems doing this?
-
Does this provide any SEO value to the receiving site?
No
Has anyone experienced problems doing this?
There are not any problems that can arise from this issue unless the target site which belongs to the SEO receives a penalty. If you stick with SEOs whom use only white hat techniques this should never be a problem.
Does this negatively impact the site with the links?
No. If you want to really look at this topic under a microscope then a very small amount of PR would flow from your site to the SEO's site. How small? If your site had 100 links per page and the PR flowed evenly to all links then we are talking about 1%. Google has inferred they devalue footer links so most likely it is a fraction of one percent.
If the SEO is doing their job well and you are pleased with their performance, I would suggest leaving the link. If you are unhappy with the SEO's performance and would not recommend their services, remove the link.
Personally, the link is something I discuss with clients upfront. I inform them exactly the words I shared in the above paragraph. If you are happy with me, leave the link and otherwise remove it.
-
I think it is a strategy which has been around pretty much since SEO started, I have seen this done for soo many years say the last 12.
I saw recently for a very strong term a site was over taken by a site that has 1/4 the total links of the top site, reason been the top site has say 1000+ and they place site wide footer links for a term on all these clients website.
It is obvious Google is aware of this practice and is de-value these types of links.
It is good for the company but I guess because they provide free advertising and also links back to their main website.
But it seems to hold some value, overall the best links are within content, near the top of the page on authority websites.
-
Hi
I believe that this practice is at best a little old hat and at worst has a negative effect on the client's site. On a homepage there will be links to deeper pages eg brands, categories, etc. It is through the homepage that juice will flow to these pages. If there are unnecessary outbound links on the homepage then this juice will be diluted, if only by a little. As the objective of an SEO is to optimise the clients page they really shouldn't post footer links. If they insist? then they should be no follow.
-
I have just had a look at the search results for the query "web design sheffield" which ranks as 48% keyword difficulty using the keyword difficulty tool.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?aq=f&sourceid=chrome&ie=UTF-8&q=web+design+sheffield
The No 2 results evoluted.net appears to have built most of it's links through footer links which suggests it does have value for SEO purposes.
I guess the concern is that the clients sites content is likely to be completely unrelated to the developers sites content, however, it is a legitimate relationship and the developer is simply being credited for their good work.
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
-
Gained a number of new 'do-follow' links - Good or Bad?
So, my client's site is on a subdomain of the parent site and there were a number of links previously pointing to the subdomain site from the main site which were all no-follow so were purely for referral/traffic benefits. Around the end of February, the main site changed all the links to 'do-follow'. Is this likely to have caused the decline we've recently seen in organic traffic to the site and a drop in rankings? I'm curious as to how that could have affected the site as we didn't know and have only just found out about it but I'm not sure how to show that it's led to a decline. Any help is appreciated!
Link Building | | soapmed1 -
AllTop Linking Me to Other Sites Feeds, Webmasters Reporting Lots of Broken Links
I submitted my blog to All Top awhile ago and something seems to be wrong with their feed. They're sending people to mysite.com/truth-o-meter.com/this-is-a-post. It's not just truth-o-meter either. I'm getting links that are supposed to go to all kinds of political blogs. As a result, I'm getting a ton of broken links reported on Google Webmasters. I couldn't find any real support option on alltop.com, and when I log in, there are no sites for me to manage. Instead, I resubmitted the site with the correct feed address and in the comments, I mentioned the problem. All I got was a message saying the site was rejected. I believe because I already added the site. But I'm thinking they didn't pay attention to the comments. (In fact the message may have gone through an auto-filter considering how quickly it was rejected.) Is there a way to solve this? Is this a situation in which I would use the disavow tool? If All Top continues to create bad links, how do I stop the issue once and for all? Thanks!
Link Building | | eglove0 -
If you discount a subscription when the client links to you, does that classify as a paid link?
For example, we all subscribe to MOZ, but if we received a 25% discount on our subscription if we linked back, would that be considered by Google as a paid link, or would it be seen as a sales tool / promotion?
Link Building | | JonathanSmith0 -
Can you get "link juice" from an outside company's/organization's intranet?
Will you get the same "link juice benefits" from a University, Government Org, or public company's intranet that are linked to your webpages – vs the benefits that you would get from links from their public webpages? Assume that the external webpages have very high Domain Authority, MozRank/Trust etc.
Link Building | | MLR0 -
Linking back to a high authority site
I have an odd situation. One of our most powerful links comes from a not-for-profit whom we have an advertisement with. That ad gets us half of our business. Recently, they slipped for the term that got them the traffic that flowed to our site. I was thinking of linking back to that page to boost them up a bit. Their page is a deep page on a high authority domain with only a few links. I am an authority site for my niche. I'd like to boost them up without diminishing my rank for other related terms. I'm willing to consider linking to them from my homepage, blog or link page. To play it safe I could just link build to them from outside my domain. Can I just link to them and its not a big deal?
Link Building | | JDP0 -
Why my twitter handle link is not getting counted in links, though for other sites it is counting!
My twitter handle page link is not getting counted, though it is getting counted for other sites
Link Building | | EG0CENTRIX0 -
Is there a tool to show you new links to your site?
Are there any tools that show you new backlinks that you have recently gained?
Link Building | | MarieHaynes0 -
Inbound Links from Web Pages Based in Other Countries
I have noticed that some of my competitors have in-bound links to their sites from high PageRanked websites. But when I investigate the websites, they are based overseas, to be mainly used for linking. Does it hurt them that the sites are based overseas despite the high Page Rank?
Link Building | | findachristianjob0