Should You Get Link back from Customers
-
In the SEO guide on Moz, it states as one of the link building strategies:
Get your customers to link to you
If you have partners you work with regularly, or loyal customers that love your brand, you can capitalize on this by sending out partnership badges—graphic icons that link back to your site (like Google often does with their AdWords certification program). Just as you'd get customers wearing your t-shirts or sporting your bumper stickers, links are the best way to accomplish the same feat on the web.
We design websites for churches and non-profits, and put a link back to our site as the designer. We recently have been told this is spammy and not a good idea. However, from what MOZ says, it sounds like they are promoting you do this.
Please comment. Thanks.
-
Thank you SO much for raising this question!
The Beginner's Guide To SEO is currently being updated and will address exactly this.
Google's John Mueller has stated in the past that it's ok to put a link on a client's site back to yours as long as it's rel="nofollow". When I was previously self-employed at Pryde Marketing, and heard Google state this, we instantly changed our client footer "Made by Pryde Marketing" links to rel="nofollow" and almost immediately saw organic improvements. I can't say for certain that changing our client > Pryde links to "nofollow" 100% caused this, but it didn't hurt.
My personal opinion is that you can benefit from clients linking back to your site in a credible way (ex. If you built their website) and have a rel="nofollow", you will be fine. If you reverse engineer any of the top web developer's sites, you'll likely see quite a few "built by xyz" linking back to their domains.
-
Good points, Julie. Thanks to all of you who responded:-)
-
Do your own research to see if it works in your market.
When I reverse engineer the other local digital agencies in the SERPS, links from clients often seem to be their only link building strategy. We've all read that Google doesn't like it, or some people think it's spammy. I think that most of what we hear from Google and the many gurus is designed as advice for Fortune 500 companies. If you're working with a dozen small customers, what works for Fortune 500 won't work for you, so don't accept their guidelines as gospel.
-
There are two things two consider:
REAL WORLD:
If your work is flawless enough that in and of itself is a living breathing advertisement for you, by all means you may want to give yourself a no follow link, so visitors there see that you have made the masterpiece if they are interested any further in your work...
GOOGLE WORLD:
If you give yourself a link that is a regular FOLLOWEd link, then you are doing your site a disservice by making your anchor text profile more spammy. but i do not see how a no-follow link can hurt anything on this side.
risk is all yours.
-
Is there any rule that if MOZ suggest, then it is true ?
-
Then just wondering why MOZ is suggesting it?
-
I think this still looks like a spammy method
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
-
Why are bit.ly and ow.ly links showing up as Inbound Links?
Hello! I noticed this question was asked a while back (around 2013 i think), but I still don't quite understand why I'm seeing these shortened URLs come up as Inbound Links? Can someone please explain? Thanks,
Link Building | | txwildcard
Carlos0 -
What is the process of link earning to avoid link building?
Hi All, I want process to earning links for new SEO 2014. Can anybody explain? Thanks, Akhilesh
Link Building | | dotlineseo0 -
Linking to sites that link to porn or casinos, my site getting penalized?
I have some link exchanges with some sites to get web traffic but when i ran the bad neighborhood link checker, i found that one site links to some casinos and another site has one link to a porn site. Is this getting me penalized? should i remove the links to these sites? Thanks, Ron
Link Building | | Ron100 -
"Activating" Links - Do External Links Have to Be Clicked On to Really Have Value?
I heard an SEO talk about the concept of "activating" a link - meaning that if an external link to your site exists, but google doesn't detect that it has gotten any actual clicks, they will significantly discount or ignore the value of the link. Obviously between Chrome, toolbars, and GA, google does have a lot of ways to detect whether a link has gotten clicks. What is the SEOmoz take on this issue?
Link Building | | kbrake0 -
Back Link: Is LinkedIn keywords in profile good Link building strategy?
I distribute industrial products B2B with e commerce. I have a personal profile on LinkedIn. I listed the products I sell and I could have all my partners and associates list my web site on their profiles. Do search engines review LinkedIn personal profiles or company profiles and is it a good marketing strategy to have my web site, keywords, and my two largest selling products on LinkedIn?
Link Building | | Wales0 -
Does it affect SEO of how quickly you get in-bound links?
We have undertaken a very aggressive in-bound linking campaign. I have a whole team of people working to get in-bound links to our site. But I dont want to cause any red flags to the search engines on how quickly we get all of these in-bound links. Will they notice or flag our site if they see a quick rise of in-bound links? Thanks.
Link Building | | findachristianjob1 -
Facebook Mentions...are they worth the effort to get as back links?
I'm currently focusing on link building for one of the websites I work on. In reviewing past customers, I see quite a few that do not have a blog, but do have social media pages like Facebook, for their business. I'm wondering if it's worth the effort to get them to "mention" the website with a link and brief comment from their Facebook page. Thanks for any/all input.
Link Building | | Technical_Contact0 -
I cannot get any links indexed to this website http://atglimo.com.
I have written nofollow, follow links, issued a press release, and submitted to the Universal Business Listing. None of these links are showing in the Yahoo index. I did a nofollow bookmark with delicious and it disappeared the next day. The people that built the website will not grant FTP access and modded the HTACCESS file incorrectly to point to a WWW. version of the site. I had them remove the index.html duplicate content problem. What is going on? Why are no links showing in the index for this site?
Link Building | | eddie404ATL0