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
-
Internal linking
Hi, I currently have built my website with internal links to boost my category pages (the ones that are the most important with the most traffic). Is the way to go or nowadays or doesn't it matter what pages you boost. I beleive what I did is some sort of "page rank sculpting" but is it still useful ? or I should I link natural across my website even though some pages will get a boost and some won't ? The link that I have are at the bottom of my content (not in the footer) but at the bottom of the page next to each other ? does they count or is it really bad to have them that way ? I have a blog and I was wondering if when I link from my blog page for example about "Barolo" to my page about "Piedmont" if I should also link from my page about "Piedmont" to my Barolo page or if the link only has to go one way from my blog / Barolo page to my piedmont page to boost Piedmont. Thank you,
Link Building | | seoanalytics0 -
Getting links on old blog posts
There's 100 of blogs with posts that link to my competitors, but don't link to my site.They are mostly lists. Eg: "The best Sites to get blue widgets" I was thinking about getting in touch with these blogs, and asking them to take a look at my site, to see if perhaps they would add it to the list. In fact, I started doing it and I got some links already. Now I am starting to worry that Google could consider these links as unnatural, because, you know, the algos are not exactly perfect. Anyway, the links are important for the exposure anyway. I've two questions: 1. Is there any chance I'll be penalized? 2. May I get a SEO benefit from this links?
Link Building | | elefantes0 -
Would it be a valid "link building' strategy to pay youtube video owners, to link to our company website in the decription of a certain video. ( For popular video's that are relevant )
I was wondering if it would it be a valid "link building' strategy to pay / work out a deal with youtube video owners, to link to our company website in the decription of a certain video they posted? ( For popular video's that are relevant to our business. ) Anyone have any thoughts on this? Thanks in advance! Steven
Link Building | | RockyMountainFlyboard0 -
Getting some links, when will I see results?
Hey Guys, I started getting some links to my website. When do you think I will see an increase in rankings? Thanks!
Link Building | | RafeTLouis0 -
Is Back Link Building still Good Practice
Since all the updates from Google I'm unsure as to whether I should be pursuing good quality back links and how many per month?for my website www.polesandblinds.com . We don't have a very large back link profile and its at least half of some of our competitors, we are currently active on blogging and the 4 main social sites. Many Thanks I look forward to your suggestions/advice/criticism.
Link Building | | JonnytheB0 -
How do I back track Broken Links?
SEOMOZ is great, it told me all the pages with 404 errors, however what would be more useful is if it told me where those links were located? Is this not available through this site, or am I just not seeing that information? If anyone knows of a how to, that is easy to moderate in difficulty to back track broken links I would appreciate it.
Link Building | | ENSO0 -
RSS links vs. contextual links
Which has more value? Passes more "link juice"? Auto generated rss links or contextual links?
Link Building | | nicole.healthline0 -
Value of Inbound Links to Pages With a lot of Outbound Links
Suppose you have a resource page of the Top 50 Awesome Sites in your niche. Since there are about 50 outbound links, then I would think there will be less Page Rank being passed to internal pages from internal links on the resource page. Since you are getting less PR passed to internal pages, are there other ways the inbound links can be beneficial, such as increasing the diversity of links of your domain? Sites like SEO Optimise seem to create a lot of Top 30 Resources lists and I have read that they think it is a strong tactic.
Link Building | | SparkplugDigital0