Confused on footer links (Which are best practices for footer links on other websites?)
-
Hello folks,
We are eCommerce web design and Development Company and we give do follow links of our website to every projects which we have done with specific keywords. So now the concern is we are seeing huge amount of back-links are being generated from single root domain for particular keyword in webmaster tools.
So what should be the best way to practice this? Should we give no follow attribute to it or can use our company logo with link?
-
Thanks guys..we are going to implement on our website..
-
Well to be completely on the safe side sure. But having a portfolio site is so extremely legitimate, transparent and common that I see no reason for worries. However, I can only speak for myself who is wearing a completely white hat and therefore sleeping sound at night;)
-
Yes Philipp B, but even with the portfolio onsite, i still recommend nofollowing those links to stick to google guidelines and play in the green area !
-
rikano's got a point there. This is why I suggest creating a portfolio or "our customers" page to place this links. There you fully disclose why links are there and you don't need to nofollow them. Links like these in the footer are bad for SEO and useless for users visiting the site.
-
Hello,
The best practice with these links is nofollowing them, unless you want to get hit by penguin or unnatural links penalty. Actually, footer links have no more value for SEO (or just litle value) and abusing them makes a clear pattern that will surely get you penalized.
I have dealt with several Google links penalties, and have recovered 80% of my clients. One thing i'm 100% sure of is: site-wide footer links when placed in multiple websites/domains will hit you soon or later. I know it's not that easy to convince you, but ask your self these questions, and u'll will surely nofollow those links:
1. Do those links add value to the page where they are placed ? (NO)
2. Would you click on a footer link, or give it trust ? (A very few people would)
3. Is that link editorial (the webmaster has placed it and he's happy to present it to his visitors to provide them with usefull resource) ? (No)
Just add rel=nofollow to that link, and start building some genuine links (guest posts, shares, broken links method) to get your site rank higher and earn more customers !
Hope it helps,regards
-
I think without nofollow is okay since linking to your clients and projects is legitimate and as long as you are transparent about why you link to them (because it's your portfolio).
-
It depends if you are looking to increase the overall authority of your website. If you are happy with the level at the moment, then yes put 'nofollow' attribute on. I would not say there was a big risk in having it 'followed' as it is an image and not keyword rich anchor text. I would also give the logo, img title/alts that are branded rather than keyword.
E.g.
Hope this helps
-
Thanks for your reply..
what do you suggest? company logo and name with "nofollow" attribute or without "nofollow" attribute?
-
Thanks Jonathan,
for your quick response and clearing our doubt. but still there is one query do we give our company logo without "nofollow" attribute? will it be advisable?
-
i vote for using an image in that situtation
For a good example for footer area links, look at Zappos and how they do theirs.
-
I would not put this in the footer, and definitely not with optimized anchor text. This will raise a red flag for google and does not add additional value to either you or your clients. If you do want to link to projects (which i think makes sense) it's better to have a portfolio page with these links. And as Jonathan suggested, use brand names or logo images to link to these projects.
-
Personally I would go with image or brand name anchor text. I read an article a while back about a UK Web company getting a manual spam penalty for having 'web design location' on all the websites they had developed. They change the anchor text to brand and filed for reconsideration and the penalty was lifted.
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
-
Why DA of my website is not increasing
Hi, Everyone.
Technical SEO | | Lauragabriel
I hope you are well So my question about Moz DA. I would like to ask that I have increased the content on my website which is related to Best Machete. I've done all the things that Google asks us to do for ranking and I'm avoiding wrongdoing. So what else do I need to do to increase Moz DA of my website?
So Please, If any one know also guide me, I would be grateful to him/her.0 -
Is SEO effected of putting an external link in the primary navigation of a website?
I have a customer, www.xxx.com. This site has good traffic, low bounce rate (28%), 2:00 min avg time on site, and 45% return visitor rating. No spam rankings, etc. Good load time. Another site, www.yyy.com, has sent out a request for them to add them as a new link in www.xxx.com's primary navigation - using a title such as "abc" (not the name of the company or site of yyy.com). This second site, www.yyy.com, has a bounce rate of 98%, avg time on site is :30, and 10.2% return visitor rate. No spam flags noted in Open Site explorer. Plus they are asking other sites similar to www.xxx.com to do the same thing. Questions/Concerns and Feedback appreciated: Will yyy.com's analytics and quality pass back to xxx.com and cause Google or algorithms to flag or penalize xxx.com? (It ranks #1 for quite a few things.) The relevancy between the sites is good -same industry, same business objectives. From a usability standpoint, isn't it more appropriate to place a link to another website in a different way? e.g. a promotional graphic wit a link or anchor text links? Isn't it more appropriate to ask another business for links - not using the primary nav of a site? (It seems yyy.com is essentially asking other sites for 'free advertising/promotion.' Thanks!
Technical SEO | | mundsack0 -
Best practice around removing large section of the website
We are looking at removing a large section of our website that is getting low/no traffic. My current thought of removing this would be to delete the pages and add 301 redirects to a similar page within the site that is not being deleted. This will be removing 400+ pages, does it this make sense? Or should we point them to the homepage? Finally should we do this in one batch or should we slowly remove the pages over the course of a couple weeks. Thanks - appreciate the help in understanding the best practice in terms of SEO.
Technical SEO | | webactive0 -
Better to Remove Toxic/Low Quality Links Before Building New High Quality Links?
Recently an SEO audit from a reputable SEO firm identified almost 50% of the incoming links to my site as toxic, 40% suspicious and 5% of good quality. The SEO firm believes it imperative to remove links from the toxic domains. Should I remove toxic links before building new one? Or should we first work on building new links before removing the toxic ones? My site only has 442 subdomains with links pointing to it. I am concerned that there may be a drop in ranking if links from the toxic domains are removed before new quality ones are in place. For a bit of background my site has a MOZ Domain authority of 27, a Moz page authority of 38. It receives about 4,000 unique visitors per month through organic search. About 150 subdomains that link to my site have a Majestic SEO citation flow of zero and a Majestic SEO trust flow of zero. They are pretty low quality. However I don't know if I am better off removing them first or building new quality links before I disavow more than a third of the links to the site. Any ideas? Thanks,
Technical SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Website Down
Hello guys, My website hasn't been reachable for couple of hours today and I can't really understand why as no links have been built, all the best practices have been followed regarding on page optimization. I also checked google webmaster tools and there are no warning messages, crawl problems or anything so I don't understand why this has happened. Now for some reason the website is up and running again.
Technical SEO | | PremioOscar1 -
Followed Linking Root Domains and No Followed Linking Domains
If you have more NoFollowed Linking Root Domains than Followed Linking Root Domains is that a problem?
Technical SEO | | INN0 -
I can buy a domain from a competitor. Whats the best way to make good use of these links for my existing website
I can buy a domain from a competitor. Whats the best way to make good use of these links for my existing website
Technical SEO | | Archers0 -
What is link juice - and how do I utilise it?
Apologies for the very basic question - I am trying to determine exactly what link juice is. Every article I seem to find assumes that you already know what link juice is. From what I can tell it is how your internal links push around from your homepage and how they flow through your site. I don't understand how to optimize this and how to improve it throughout my site - or what the opportunities are. I'll attach an image of my site link numbers compared to a few rivals (names removed) to illustrate the difference - not vs the first column but certainly the other two. Can someone shed some light on Link Juice for me and point me in the right direction? Thanks. Oy2c5.png
Technical SEO | | Benj250