Are site wide links bad for web developers?
-
Like many web dev companies, we put an anchor text credit (varying the anchor text) in the footer of clients' sites. As it's a footer link, it's site wide.
This strategy's been troubling me for a while and I've been anticipating a drop in our rankings ... especially in light of Penguin. But it hasn't happened.
Any other developers our there taken a hit by having site wide links? anyone have any views on this? Anyone want to comment on the spurious and unlikely scenario that Google may recognise that web dev companies have always used site wide credits and may therefore be overlooking / not penalising them?
-
We've gotten new business from our signature links. Just use a nofollow tag and you'll be within guidelines. The link is there to get new customers. Not increase search rankings. It doesn't make sense to remove the link. Doing so would be a bad user experience.
-
Yes, straight links, "in theory" should be ok.
But speaking from the perspective of the website owner, you will never find one of my sites with sitewide links to web devs.... and especially not to SEOs or hosting providers.
I think that it will do nothing at all that is positive for my site.
-
Straight links should in theory be good though? (Like the following as a example: "Hosted by "Wehostthissite ?
-
Artists have always signed their work. It is a good thing to do for many reasons and it benefits people beyond the artist.
Web devs continued the tradition of signing their work when they built the first websites for others.
However, when they realized that a link might help their rankings they stopped signing and began linking. Some might have linked their signatures prior to that, just to make it easy for people to visit their websites.
When they realized that keyword anchor text might also be beneficial for search engine rankings they stopped linking their signatures and began linking their keywords.
In an honest assessment, any thoughtful person should conclude that keyword links are done for manipulation. Linked signatures might not be manipulative, but some probably are.
I am not a web dev but if I was I wouldn't be linking my keywords.
-
I have no good answer here, but i would like one.
However: I can say that i haven't noticed any negative effect myself on one site where we have quite a bit of site-wide links on other sites due to the site owners giving us a small link in the header/footer. Seeing that this definately is "legit" links i would hope that there should be no negative changes due to this.
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Is having one blanket h1 tag across my site bad?
I've been working on figuring out if my site host (jigsy) is hindering my seo. The site editor doesn't allow me to assign individual h1 tags for each page, it just blankets one across the whole site as part of a theme.....is this normal?...would it be better to have individual h1s?....is that a thing? Or should I work on making a better one since all my pages should technically be related to counseling/therapy? Site: www.joeborders.com
Technical SEO | | joebordersmft1 -
Competitors link building surely link farming ? but no punishment?
Hi there added a competitors metrics to see what they were doing and to my amazement they seem to have 1000+ links surely this is link farming considering we stay in a very remote area. also why would he be rewarded for this not punished? imgur.com/18dUqNL 18dUqNL 18dUqNL
Technical SEO | | ShauniBROWN2 -
How to remove all sandbox test site link indexed by google?
When develop site, I have a test domain is sandbox.abc.com, this site contents are same as abc.com. But, now I search site:sandbox.abc.com and aware of content duplicate with main site abc.com My question is how to remove all this link from goolge. p/s: I have just add robots.txt to sandbox and disallow all pages. Thanks,
Technical SEO | | JohnHuynh0 -
Bad link profile?
Hi Mozzers! We have recently been handed this client due to the former SEO company building up a bad link profile, which resulted in the site dropping off the search results all together. Forcing them to get a new domain. This happened in July last year and we are unsure whether it would be wise to submit a reconsideration request and then 301 their old sites pages to the new domain. Basically I'm asking whether you can spot any spammy links being built in their profile. Here is the old domain: http://www.claimssolicitors.co.uk/ It would be great if you could help me out! 🙂 Thanks
Technical SEO | | Webrevolve0 -
Too many links? Do links to named anchors count (ie page#nameanchor)?
Hi, I have an internal search results page that contains approx 200 links in total. This links to approx 50 pages. Each result listing contains a link to the page in the format /page.html and also has 3 more links (for each listing) to named anchors within the page. eg /page.html#section1, /page.html#section2, /page.html#section3 etc. Should i remove the named anchors to keep my links per page under the Seomoz suggested max of 100? Will it impact crawl-ability or link juice being passed? Thanks in advance for your response.
Technical SEO | | blackrails0 -
SEO Developers
I have a team of inexperienced SEO developers and the argument we continually have is that its a marketing role - however most of it is technical, no view state, no js, page load time, csssprite, metatags, frequency of updates to server, duplicate content via coding methodology, lioading content prior to ads, not spidering ads (IT says impossible yet google says required) etc. I looked at your referrals for developers and couldnt find any that recognized SEO as part of their skill set - do you believe tehre aer developers that specialize in this? Thanks, Michelle
Technical SEO | | Silly8880 -
Index forum sites
Hi Moz Team, somehow the last question i raised a few days ago not only wasnt answered up until now, it was also completely deleted and the credit was not "refunded" - obviously there was some data loss involved with your restructuring. Can you check whether you still find the last question and answer it quickly? I need the answer 🙂 Here is one more question: I bought a website that has a huge forum, loads of pages with user generated content. Overall around 500.000 Threads with 9 Million comments. The complete forum is noindex/nofollow when i bought the site, now i am thinking about what is the best way to unleash the potential. The current system is vBulletin 3.6.10. a) Shall i first do an update of vbulletin to version 4 and use the vSEO tool to make the URLs clean, more user and search engine friendly before i switch to index/follow? b) would you recommend to have the forum in the folder structure or on a subdomain? As far as i know subdomain does take lesser strenght from the TLD, however, it is safer because the subdomain is seen as a separate entity from the regular TLD. Having it in he folder makes it easiert to pass strenght from the TLD to the forum, however, it puts my TLD at risk c) Would you release all forum sites at once or section by section? I think section by section looks rather unnatural not only to search engines but also to users, however, i am afraid of blasting more than a millionpages into the index at once. d) Would you index the first page of a threat or all pages of a threat? I fear duplicate content as the different pages of the threat contain different body content but the same Title and possibly the same h1. Looking forward to hear from you soon! Best Fabian
Technical SEO | | fabiank0