Is it negative to put a backlink into the footer's website of our clients ?

[mywebshop]

Hello there !

Everything is in the subject of this post but here is the context : we are a web agency and we, among others, build websites for our clients (most of them are shops). Until now, we put a link in their footer, like "developped by MyWebShop".

But we don't know if it is bad or not. With only one website we can have like hundred of backlinks at once, but is it good for SEO or not ? Will Google penalize us thinking that is blackhat practices ? Is it better to put our link in the "legal notices" or "disclaimer" part of the websites ?

What is the best practice for a lasting SEO ?

I hope you understand my question,

Thnak you in advance !

[eseyo]

I asked a similar question to this here http://www.seomoz.org/q/site-wide-footer-links-or-single-website-credits-page and it has possibly useful answers. I'd be interested to hear your views on whether to: A) create site-wide footer links on all pages of my client sites (varying anchor) B) just create a "Website Credits" page and include this inthe sitemap C) create site wide footer links to the website credits page, and link from this back to my site I look forward to hearing your views...

[Dr-Pete]

I'm actually not sure I agree. From a theoretical, PageRank-passing perspective, sitewide links are better. From a penalty/risk perspective, 1000s of sitewide links can lead to a ton of links coming from very few unique domains, which can start to look suspicious. I actually think you might see less devaluation by limiting the footer links to a couple of strong pages on each client site.

[Dr-Pete]

Practically, I think Julie is right, but I have seen heavy devaluation of these footer links in the past year or two. They'll still count for something, but not a lot. The only warning I'd add is that I wouldn't create a situation where these are your ONLY links. You could risk looking like a link farm and even a potential penalty at that point. These easy links should be only one part of your link-building strategy.

I'd also highly encourage diversity. Mix up the anchor text, as long as it's relevant, and maybe even put the link different places. If you can get contextual links somehow (not footers or sidebars), that's a huge plus. The more you can mix it up, the better.

[Ecreativeworks]

From a pure SEO perspective, it's better to have the link in the footer appearing on each page.

[icecarats]

Speaking personally I'm not in favor of it but more from an appearance perspective. I've seen a lot of cases where this is abused by smaller operations who aren't taking their customer's overall outbound link profiles into account. We've inherited projects where the previous designer put about 100 words into the META author tag spamming his keywords, and then in addition put at least a paragraph of ALT text on his footer link. The client didn't even know it was there, or what it necessarily meant.

I also think it detracts from the appearance/professionalism of larger clients sites. I think personally I'm moving towards either very subtle and small center-footer links, with the full knowledge of the client, or a paragraph and link on the About US/Partners page. Note this is my opinion on what we're doing and not meant as an indictment of anyone else's practices.

[mywebshop]

Thanks for your "enlightenment"

I wonder if it wouldn't be better (on the pure seo perspective) to only put a link on the credit page for exemple ?

[Ecreativeworks]

This is standard practice of almost all web design agencies. Giant blog platforms like Wordpress and Blogger also put in a credit link by default. The presence of a credit link like you described the footer will not hurt you in any way.

There is some debate about whether or not it will help you at all (I think it will -- footer links are greatly discounted, but still seem to count for something) but it won't hurt, and it makes sense from a branding/advertising perspective.

[ChristineCadena]

I know with Panda 3.3 update this past week, there has been some change to the way Google interprets back links. So, I'll be curious what the opinions of other people would be. Personally, I wouldn't put a link in the footer of client sites........just my opinion.....