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I take your point regarding the nofollow tag, and those footer links are certainly useful ways for humans to discover your agency through a client's site.

However, if I am completely honest, those links have always been placed there with SEO in mind. More incoming links to our site with our carefully chosen keywords boosted our rankings. That's what we were taught, and it was always encouraged. If a human happened to find us via one of those links, that was just a bonus.

Of course this goes against Google's 'design for humans, not for search engines' thing, but for years it has been a standard, accepted practice to 'optimise' those incoming links. And now it is suddenly dishonest - it turns out we've been manipulating Google's results, cheating our way to better rankings.

To me, those 'web design by [agency]' footer links don't feel wrong. They are truthful words, linking to a genuine agency who did the web design. For those reasons I still feel that we should be entitled to any SEO benefit, not adding nofollow like we are doing something criminal.

I need to get my head around this, and it may take some time. Are all incoming links for SEO purposes now evil?

We do link back to clients through Case Studies and Our Portfolio pages. I think many agencies do this. Although the footer may not be the best place if you have hundreds of clients!

I just asked a similar question here :

Following Penguin, what is the best practice for a web design agency placing a footer link in client sites?

(I didn't see this existing topic)

The advice I received was :

1. Use only your brand name in anchor text when linking from client websites

2. A single link from a clients home page is probably better than linking from every page.

Thank you both.

In summary :

1. Use only your brand name in anchor text when linking from client websites

2. A single link from a clients home page is probably better than linking from every page.

Sounds like good advice

Thank you for your response. We are happy to use our brand name in links, although our brand name is actually 'New Forest Web Design', which could still be seen as spammy because The New Forest is the area we trade and Web Design is a service, so Google could see our brand as '[area] Web Design'. Our actual company name is 'New Forest Web Design Ltd', so I guess we should use that?

Also, is it better to have a single link on a client's site, rather than on every page? Some dynamic sites could end up with thousands of links pointing to us. I was thinking that a single link on the home page of each site may be better?

For years we have included a 'Web Design by ...' link in the footer of all client websites designed by us.

However, following the Penguin update, it seems that this legitimate practice could now be penalised.

Should we be removing those links from our client's sites? There are tens of thousands, all with similar or identical text!

For future client sites, should we avoid these footer links altogether? Or maybe limit the link to a single page on each site?