Plenty of webmasters do not link out for selfish or strategic reasons.....

... but the web is all about linking.  That is why they call it "the web".

I link out a lot.  I believe that it makes my pages richer information sources.  I believe that it builds credibility.

If you were a visitor would you prefer a page that has no links or the same page that links out to information sources, sites with great information on directly related subjects?  Which of those would be recommended more via tweets, links, likes, emails?

So, my vote is that google gives credit for linking out and even if they don't your visitors will.

According to Google it is a link scheme.  If the anchor text is keyword optimized then it is also linkspam.

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en

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.

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.

If you have thousands of articles that are not pulling search traffic, dropping them from your site allows the PR that's trapped in those pages to flow into the rest of the site.

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.

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.

We would like to understand why.

I doubt that anyone outside of Google has a good answer for this.  For some reason, Google thinks that your page is better promoted to the searcher with the short title.

Sometimes I debate with myself if one of my articles should have a one word title such as "widgets".  But, I usually go with a longer (but still simple and easily read) title that I believe will elicit clicks.   I used to think that Google was stinking up my clever marketing when they shortened my title.  However, now I think that I am a 70-year-old white guy who has lived in rural places all of my life and I have no idea what would appeal to younger people in different parts of the world.  So, if Google wants to shorten my title tag the results will probably be good.