I'm with Randy Epp on this but it does raise questions and concern for me. I am surprised by the critical attitude connected with opinions that many of you share that designers shouldn't include links to their sites. I've never encountered that sentiment before. We are also a web design company and follow the same practice: we include our intention and request for permission to place a brand link on our client's site in both the proposal and our contract. 99.99% of all our clients over close to 15 years in business have been more than happy to include that reference to us on their site. It also helps them in their promotion of us. The one exception was a company that requires a particular level of confidentiality and was unable to allow it. Our prospects also appreciate the ease with which they can contact us when they stumble upon a site they love and want to know who designed it. I understand that footer links like these have low value and have also fairly recently learned that they may be perceived by Google as unnatural links. We experienced a disasterous loss in page rank for our two top keywords in late December 2012. But we have had no warnings in Webmaster Tools and I am hoping our drop was not due to these links, but rather to a lack of other quality links compared to our competition. Especially since other keywords had no loss and our brand comes up #1 which implies no penalties. Additionally, our competitors also have footer links on their client sites. My main question around these links has been whether to go back and create variation in the anchor text and after reading this thread if we should go back and change to nofollow. Either way, I suspect that tedious amoun of time consuming labor is better spent creating more quality content and creating a link building plan.
