Are backlinks in the form of Footer or Sitewide links safe?
-
Hi There!
Some of our competitors are using sitewide links in the header, footer or sidebar…is it ok to use these type of backlinks to increase overall backlinks. The site-wide links increase backlinks dramatically.
Thanks
Malik Zakaria
-
Hi,
No, there is no good reason to do this. For linking purposes, this will do absolutely nothing for you. Sitewide and Footer links are mostly just ignored or devalued by Google, but could end up with you looking spammy.
Rand actually did a Whiteboard Friday about this very subject last year.
https://moz.com/blog/links-headers-footers-navigation-impact-seo
-Andy
-
Hello there, I asked the same question here and we've followed this advice:
"This is a common issue and if you do a Google search about this issue, you will find a lot of discussion about this with many kind of opinions. Sitewide footer links are generally not a safe idea. Many people recommend making those links nofollow.
One solution could be to make the sitewide links nofollow, except the link in your customers frontpage footer. Then you'll get the link juice from the front page, but no penalty from sitewide links."
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
-
How to make Form Type Links have "Nofollow" attributes
Hello guys, in doing an analysis of our website using SEMRush, we discovered that there are Form Type links from some of the business websites connected to our website with follow attributes. SEMRush has identified them as toxic backlinks. What is the proper HTML code structure for setting Form Type links with nofollow attributes?
Link Building | | Lovingly0 -
Spammy links
Hi Guys, I have a case which seems to occur more often for our customers. The websites of our customers seem to receive tons of backlinks from websites all over the world (China, Russia, Ukrain, etc). It’s spam we never asked for, we didn’t buy any dodgy linkbuilding packages or anything. Do any of you guys have experience with this matter? We try to disavow the links but it takes too much time and we will never manage to disavow 100% of all links. Examples are www.keukensduitsland.nl and www.m2beveiliging.nl Hope anyone has experience and maybe even solutions for this matter. Thanks!
Link Building | | Happy-SEO1 -
Will short linking to my site affect SERPs attribution of inbound link?
Some brand partners are using their short links to link back to our site (like bit.ly but they have their own). They have a high domain authority and trust so we want that link back to be read by Google. When I downloaded all inbound links from Moz, this brand's site was not listed, making me worried that the inbound link isn't being seen or considered! Haven't been able to find any info on this...
Link Building | | PAC31350 -
Is providing a paid scholarship to schools and receiving a back link, classed as a paid link scheme?
I've always wondered if it is classed as paid links in Google's eyes?
Link Building | | ResumeGenius0 -
Link building during link removal
We were advised by out outsourced link removal vendor not to build any links while they are removing links pointing to our site. I am worried that our site will lose significant traffic if we dont build any new links while waiting for them to remove links that caused our site to be penalized. What are your thoughts?
Link Building | | WizardOfMoz0 -
My site has more than 1,341,796 total links but only 500 external links after months of SEO. Please help me ,not sure what went wrong.
My site has more than 1,341,796 total links but only 500 external links after months of SEO. Please help me ,not sure what went wrong.
Link Building | | rsethia1230 -
Finding links online that already exist as link juice based on search results
I'm curious about this, I can't find anything on the net that talks about it. I wrote an article about it on squidoo and have had no responses so I am thinking this is very rare subject. The question is I have done some backlink research with my competitors with linkdetective.com and found many links (even follow ones) related to sites that provide search results. Here are a link about what I am talking about as an example, I have found many more besides this one. http://search.lphant.com/es/webResults.html?q=free%20scrabble%20dictionary&hl=en&page=1&src=hmp_es&ref=1 My site appears in those results. When looking at the source there is no "nofollow". I found this page because linkdetective.com had this link listed pointing to my competitor. Are these valid backlinks? What I have been doing is adding these links to http://www.google.com/addurl so that Google knows about them. Is there something I am missing or are these valid?
Link Building | | cbielich0 -
Link Targets
What do you think of getting links from... high quality sites, with many non spammy high trusted links to them....but their traffic has been majorly hit by panda. I suspect perhaps for having too many thin pages. Is persuing links on these sites a good idea or not? I'd welcome opinions.
Link Building | | PeterM220