Welcome to the Q&A Forum

One of our potential clients is a limousine rental service. His current "Marketer" is going about his business in a seemingly sketchy way. I'm pretty new to having to compare myself to other SEO/Marketing competition. So, this guy has 100's of websites that are nearly identical. Quite a few have duplicate content, but all of them generally look the same. He leases these websites as lead generators: Think of it like this: he probably has 15-20 websites all geared for different parts of the DFW area. Denton Limo Service, Plano Limo Service, Dallas Limo Service, Etc. He also has a bunch of websites for other industries. Every "business" has its own phone number via a Google Number that he forwards to the actual business line. Every "business" has a Google My Business Listing setup as well with no address listed. When someone fills out the contact form on one of these sites, it is forwarded to the business who is leasing it. He also creates his own backlinks on his websites to all of his other websites. I imagine that eventually he will be caught, right? I mean, this has to be Black Hat SEO. Have any of you encountered an SEO/Marketer like this? If so, what do you do about it?

I'm kinda new to the whole backlinks thing. My company does website design and we have, historically, included a statement in the Footer of the websites stating "Website by Our Company" linking back to our own website. Should we be NoFollowing these links? Are they hurting us in any way? Are there any best practices for this?

Does Google treat bit.ly links differently? If someone linked to my site through bit.ly, would Google see that link as if they had used the normal (exmaple.com/blogpost/) link?