Footer Back Links Question "Site by built by"
-
Hi all
I design and develop websites for clients within the UK. With each website I build, I always add a link to the footer of the website which links back to my website.
I have always used the link anchor text "Site By Jump" but then decided to try to use the link anchor text to our benefit by changing the links across all of our portfolio of sites to be:
"Graphic Design by Jump"
or
"Web Design by Jump"In the hope that this helped us rank better for those keyword phrases.
Now something occurred to me the day. Most of the websites I build have no relevance to the content on our website. For example, I could build a website for Baby Food and add a backlink to our homepage which doesn't even mention the words "baby food".
In some cases, the websites can have thousands of pages, each with this footer link appearing at the bottom of each page.
My question is, could these backlinks potentially be seen as black hat or spam to a search engine? I.e. thousands of backlinks from websites that have no relevance in terms of content all linking back to my homepage?
Thank you for reading and any advice would be greatly appreciated.
-
We have taken the view that we will leave our "site by" links alone, we are ranking well for key phrases and the danger being that changing these links will affect it.
That said, we have removed links from some client websites with poor DA and PR as a precaution and it doesn't seem to have done us any harm, in fact i think it may have improved SERPs on a few keywords, but a little early to say for sure.
-
And if we only knew what that tipping point was!
Thanks for the advice.
-
Sure, it's a tough decision as you never know how close you are to a penalty unfortunately.
I wouldn't go about changing the existing links on clients sites if you'r still ranking for these terms now but keep this in mind for any new links you acquire. Maybe link with just your brand name for most of them and then throw in the odd anchor text variation every now and then. You just need to avoid a tipping point where your profile starts to look suspicious.
-
Thanks for the advice Maximise.
The only issue with that is that we know from our analytics that visitors do actually find us by searching for some of the exact keyphrases we have in our back link anchor text. Just searching for (for example) "Web Designers UK" (or variations of that) is so saturated we long tail it or localise it which wins us clients. By removing the link from the "Web Design" part of the footer link I would be afraid that this would in time have a detrimental effect on our rankings for those search phrases.
I guess if we leave it as it is then there is always that risk that we could get a penalty anyway...
-
Hi Nathan
Do you link from every page on the sites you build or just the homepage?
I watched a Matt Cutts video the other day (<cite class="kv">www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0fgh5RIHdE)</cite> in which he explains that footer links get weighted less than links that are generally surrounded by page copy which I can understand but I was wondering if the sheer volume of these footer links, on a large site, all with the same anchor text could be seen as spammy?
I know we may never actually be 100% sure if they do or not but any thoughts or suggestions of members would be appreciated.
-
It sounds like many are concerned about this issue recently. It's a definite possibility that you could get an over optimisation penalty for the anchor text match and you could stop ranking for that term. I think the strategy going forward is probably to link back using your brand name or url only. If possible it would also be better if you can find a place for the link on your clients site that is not part of the main template so it doesn't cause a site wide link.
Consider changing your link to something like this:
Web Design by Jump
-
I understand completely what you are saying. I own a design firm in Atlanta, Georgia and we do a similar tactic. I personally, think it is important to vary your keywords you are targeting. It may look fishy that all your back links are keywords for web design.
A back-link from a site serves more of a purpose then just keywords. If the site receives a lot of traffic and people love the design they may click the link to see who designed it. We use the following anchor text " Powered By, Atlanta Small Business Web Design, Small Business Web Design, Developed By, Designed By and our link www.treelifedesigns.com
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
-
Am I better off with ten links from one site or one link from ten sites?
I am writing a series of linked-back articles for a highly-ranked web publisher, but wonder if I'd be better off sharing the articles across different sites. My goal is to grow our domain authority and SEO rankings.
Link Building | | Lysarden0 -
Other websites copy content and giving a link back
Hi, I've just noticed a few back links in Google Search Console, I was excited. But when I saw the backlinks, 2 other websites that had completely copied my content and then gave a backlink to my website. Is this bad for SEO and would google penalise my website for this?
Link Building | | thinkLukeSEO1 -
Link building for a new site... where do I start?
Hi all, I'm new and have just launched my website. I need to start building my backlinks and I need to know how I can go about getting started? I read the beginners guide but still stuck on where to start? Any advice Thanks
Link Building | | edward-may0 -
100's of .info links pointing to my site
Hi, in the past few weeks 100's of .info links appeared in WMT pointing to my site. Should I be worried about these links ? What can I do to block them ? Thanks nick [edited for proper category - Keri]
Link Building | | orion680 -
Are high quality press release syndication site links valuable?
Suppose your press release got picked up by high authority sites like Yahoo, Morningstar, PaidContent.org, etc. But they republished the press release and kept the links. Do these links pass any value since the sites are just republishing the press release?
Link Building | | ProjectLabs0 -
"ghost" links on opensite explorer
today I've checked link building progress for a site I am working on. I've noticed lots of new links and new domains, I was happy but a bit surprised because I havent'y done any serious link building yet. investigating more, I've checked the pages that should be linking my site, and these pages are on totally unreleated sites or they doesn't even exist! as an example, my site is about road bicycles, and opensite report this links: www.murrayschicken.com/
Link Building | | DavideM
murrayschicken.com/alejandro-suaya
murrayschicken.com/weeds-actress
murrayschicken.com/gt-bikes-bump
murrayschicken.com/goldie-gray
murrayschicken.com/anna-elias
murrayschicken.com/brian-joseph-ochab and 14 more as you can see, these pages are down. probably never existed. so what's happen? opensite is getting crazy? www.murrayschicken.com/ has been got hacked? my client is doing some black hat link building? any opinions?0 -
Internal linking question
How important is internal linking from body content? If you have 500 words of content on each page is it good practise to try and get a few links in to other pages? Surely if you do this your pass more juice out of the page, which might lead to devaluing the page in the SE's.
Link Building | | activitysuper0 -
One client, one b2b site and one b2c site - linking relationship
I have a client that has 2 websites in a particular industry. The first website concentrates on advertising services and products to other organisations/companies but does not sell anything online. The second website is an ecommerce site with many products from the same industry and is more a b2c operation. Would it be considered ok to add maybe 5 footer links from one to the other and vice versa? considering that they are footer links and will ultimately increase total links pointing to both site exponentially. Both sites are hosted in the same location.
Link Building | | Gareth_Cartman0