Should You Link Back from Client's Website?
-
We had a discussion in the office today, about if it can help or hurt you to link back to your site from one that you optimize, host, or manage.
A few ideas that were mentioned:
HURT:
1. The website is not directly related to your niche, therefore Google will treat it as a link exchange or spammy link.
2. Links back to you are often not surrounded by related text about your services, and looks out of place to users and Search Engines.HELP:
1. On good (higher PR, reputable domain) domains, a link back can add authority, even if the site is not directly related to your services.
2. Allows high ranking sites to show users who the provider is, potentially creating a new client, and a followed incoming link on anchor text you can choose.So, what do you think? Test results would be appreciated, as we are trying to get real data. Benefits and cons if you have an opinion.
-
Hi everyone
We have read through all these comments, but still not sure what to do about this. We do church web design, and our link would be on church websites. That seems relevant to me.
These responses go back to 2014. Is there any current advice or information on this topic?
Thanks:-)
-
As someone who used to work at a company on the Recommended list (and who was in charge of the Contact form) - we did get leads. They were about 80% appropriate for the business model, although a lot were too small or wanting short-term projects (my agency generally took on corporate-level accounts for long periods of time). I would say that this sort of linking is different to just linking to clients, e.g. if we then went on to link to an insurance company that came to us through a Moz Recommended referral. But if your SEO company partners with a PPC agency or design firm, provides some services to the other and sends out a relevant link, that seems a little more relevant.
On the other hand, I hate these discussions about what we're "allowed" to link to
-
Under No Circumstances do I see this to be something you should do. I often advise clients to get any link which isn't giving value to the user off the site ASAP.
Often that includes "Site created by ..." Lowest of the low I'm afraid.
So that's a No from me!
-
People who come to Moz are in the same niche as the recommended companies. It'd be way different if I had the same link at the bottom of my site that's about model battleships.
-
I'd think -- or hope! -- that Google Penguin or something else would stop that result at some point.
-
I hear a potential YouMoz post?
Footer links may not refer a lot of valuable traffic. But other types of pages could. For example: I'm sure the businesses that are on Moz's recommended list get leads. Pages with similar types of (no-follow) links could do the same (rather than footer links).
-
Only robots who don't buy anything.
-
To be honest, I doubt anyone really gets much referral business from footer links no follow or not. It clearly a way of getting authority high pr links for free.
-
I'd love to see a case study from a firm talking about the amount of traffic they get from these links, and if it turns into any leads or sales for them.
-
Ive seen a company in Glasgow that does this to the extreme. In fact they rank for "seo glasgow" and their link profile is made up of all footer links. seo by seo glasgow and they rank well. web design by "web design glasgow" etc
-
Yes, that is better.... but you will only be able to do it on websites that tolerate unpaid advertising.
-
Thumbed-up for being what I would do!
-
What about something like : "Site design By Company Link" that is no-follow? That way you can get direct traffic but doesnt pass link juice?
-
With owner permission "having your name on the site in unlinked text" seems the best to do.
I remember the penalty story of 'Web Design Yorkshire by Pinpoint Designs' - http://moz.com/blog/ultimate-guide-to-google-penalty-removal
<greyhat>Need to vary anchor text if you do it :).</greyhat>
-
CNN, Tribune, and other big companies often have both in-house people and agencies. I know people who are at (or were at) both CNN and the Tribune who are in-house SEOs who work with contracted agencies.
-
I would advise against it for one simple reason: You would be directly violating Google's guidelines and setting both you and your clients up for potential penalties.
Google states: Any links intended to manipulate PageRank or a site's ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme and a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site or outgoing links from your site.
If you actively build a do-follow link on another site for the purposes of affecting search results, then you are doing exactly this.
-
CNN, WJS, Today, and ESPN have their own in-house team of developers and designers. i think that's not a good example.
Having a link to your website from a client website as you say yes is a good advertising as a web developer agency or hosting company. they are outsourcing services which means to them less head ache and saving money because they don't have to buy a server or have a full time in-house developer and SEO specialist which from my point will be a fair trade of having the companies link on their website as well as sometimes the agencies put their clients links on their websites as success stories or current customers.
-
Allows high ranking sites to show users who the provider is, potentially creating a new client, and a followed incoming link on anchor text you can choose.
My answer on this has nothing to do with SEO.
It has to do with where I believe the role of a service provider is supposed to begin and end.
I personally think that SEOs linking back to their own sites from a client site is low form. The SEO is supposed to be helping the client not siphoning his power. You could accomplish that visibility by simply having your name on the site in unlinked text. Adding a link is unnecessary and greedy.
When I see those links on other sites, I do find it to be useful information. I know who I would not hire.
Honestly, if an SEO or designer or hosting provider wanted to put a link on my site I would tell him "no" nicely. If they argued or pressed for it my consideration of his company would be concluded. The link is not necessary for attribution.
If an SEO or hosting company wanted to have their name at the bottom of my site without the link I would tell them how much it would cost to advertise there. The value of that advertising would probably exceed the value of the service that they provided.
If you go to a big brand site such as CNN, WSJ, Today, ESPN, you don't see links to SEOs, hosting or designers. They are not being billboards for their service providers.
My displeasure on this is extremely strong against SEOs and hosting providers. For designers I can understand why they ask. For a designer, if I am exceedingly pleased with what they have done I might list them on the "about us" page, where I mention a few people who have contributed to the content of the site. Why the designer? Because they improved what people see and that includes matching the design to my content or complimenting it.
I have different views when it comes to photographs, graphics, videos. I always name the creator of those content assets and often link to their website in the caption. Why? Because they are a content source and my visitors might want to see more of their work. It is similar to a reference link on a Wikipedia article. Those links are useful to the visitors. Even if I paid them a license fee, I mention them and usually link to them (the only exception is with a thumbnail, but that thumbnail always links to an article where their photo is prominent and with attribution and usually a link). I give them attribution because I want to help them. They usually have sites that are less visible than mine. And I want them to feel that the got back more than they gave.
My site is not about SEO or about hosting or design. So a link to those sites is not useful to my visitor, so it really should not be there.
-
We never place a link without the site owners permission.
-
Just to be clear, are you going to ask for the client's permission first?
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
-
Does this type of link pass juice?
I have a backlink that looks like this: https://theirsite.com/go/?t=https%3A//www.mysite.com Will that pass link juice?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | vcj0 -
Sudden influx of 404's affecting SERP's?
Hi Mozzers, We've recently updated a site of ours that really should be doing much better than it currently is. It's got a good backlink profile (and some spammy links recently removed), has age on it's side and has been SEO'ed a tremendous amount. (think deep-level, schema.org, site-speed and much, much more). Because of this, we assumed thin, spammy content was the issue and removed these pages, creating new, content-rich pages in the meantime. IE: We removed a link-wheel page; <a>https://www.google.co.uk/search?q=site%3Asuperted.com%2Fpopular-searches</a>, which as you can see had a **lot **of results (circa 138,000). And added relevant pages for each of our entertainment 'categories'.
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | ChimplyWebGroup
<a>http://www.superted.com/category.php/bands-musicians</a> - this page has some historical value, so the Mozbar shows some Page Authority here.
<a>http://www.superted.com/profiles.php/wedding-bands</a> - this is an example of a page linking from the above page. These are brand new URLs and are designed to provide relevant content. The old link-wheel pages contained pure links (usually 50+ on every page), no textual content, yet were still driving small amounts of traffic to our site.
The new pages contain quality and relevant content (ie - our list of Wedding Bands, what else would a searcher be looking for??) but some haven't been indexed/ranked yet. So with this in mind I have a few questions: How do we drive traffic to these new pages? We've started to create industry relevant links through our own members to the top-level pages. (http://www.superted.com/category.php/bands-musicians) The link-profile here _should _flow to some degree to the lower-level pages, right? We've got almost 500 'sub-categories', getting quality links to these is just unrealistic in the short term. How long until we should be indexed? We've seen an 800% drop in Organic Search traffic since removing our spammy link-wheel page. This is to be expected to a degree as these were the only real pages driving traffic. However, we saw this drop (and got rid of the pages) almost exactly a month ago, surely we should be re-indexed and re-algo'ed by now?! **Are we still being algor****hythmically penalised? **The old spammy pages are still indexed in Google (138,000 of them!) despite returning 404's for a month. When will these drop out of the rankings? If Google believes they still exist and we were indeed being punished for them, then it makes sense as to why we're still not ranking, but how do we get rid of them? I've tried submitting a manual removal of URL via WMT, but to no avail. Should I 410 the page? Have I been too hasty? I removed the spammy pages in case they were affecting us via a penalty. There would also have been some potential of duplicate content with the old and the new pages.
_popular-searches.php/event-services/videographer _may have clashed with _profiles.php/videographer, _for example.
Should I have kept these pages whilst we waited for the new pages to re-index? Any help would be extremely appreciated, I'm pulling my hair out that after following 'guidelines', we seem to have been punished in some way for it. I assumed we just needed to give Google time to re-index, but a month should surely be enough for a site with historical SEO value such as ours?
If anyone has any clues about what might be happening here, I'd be more than happy to pay for a genuine expert to take a look. If anyone has any potential ideas, I'd love to reward you with a 'good answer'. Many, many thanks in advance. Ryan.0 -
Website that lost ranking and now starting to recovery
Hello guys,
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WayneRooney
About a month ago we got in the webmaster tool a message that saying that we have unnatural links to the website.
We got drop from 200 keys that was in page 1-2 to pages 5-8.
We check our links and notice that someone links more then 1000 links to our site. We apply for reconsideration request plus we send the file with the links to Google to ask to remove. Yesterday we got message from Google that say : Manual spam action revoked.
We check today the ranking and we saw that from 3 keys that was in the first page, now we are with 24 in the first page. Very good improvement but still very far from the 130 keys that was in the first page a month ago. I wanted to ask, what can we expect ?
Are we gonna get the lost ranking now ?
Is this happen overnight ?Maybe the big change will be in the next penguin update ? Bottom Line, what is the chance to get back the ranking as we had before ?
This is the most important thing right now... Thank you0 -
Inbound Links Inquiry for a New Site
For a site that is only one to two months old, what is considered a natural amount of inbound links if you're site offers very valuable information, and you have done a marketing push to get the word out about your blog? Even if you are receiving backlinks from authority websites with high DA, does Google get suspicious if there are too many inbound links during the first few months of a sites existence? I know there are some sites that blow up very fast and receive thousands of backlinks very quickly, so I'm curious to know if Google puts these kind of sites on a watchlist or something of that nature. Or is this simply a good problem to have?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | WebServiceConsulting.com0 -
Competition Link Metrics Analysis - Do you have any suggestions ?
My sub-pages are ranking well, but Homepage isn't ranking well for the keywords I'd like it to. It used to in the past. My site - njhypnotherapy.com used to rank (#2-5) 1st page in google for many keywords. In Sep/Oct I noticed my homepage ranking drop dramatically for the main keywords. Well, I made some foolish decisions and I'm trying to clean up the mess. Low quality links, duplicate content...etc I rewrote most of the content, removed unnecessary pages, removed as many low quality links, and used disavow for the rest. It's been a 2 Weeks now. I noticed a lot of improvements in my sub-pages. From #50 to #20. Not Bad. My homepage still isn't ranking. Any suggestions to improve? Btw, I've included my link metrics below if it helps 🙂 Thank You metricks.png
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | njhypnotherapy0 -
Spam linking site how to report
I have a spam linking site that is generation thousans of links to my site. Even if i have a good link background, this is the only spammy i have, each week number of links comings from it increases by 500 , i know have 3000 links for that site and 1800 for other sites, but that one keeps growing What should i do, i dont want that link it is imposible to remove as webmaster does not respond
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | maestrosonrisas0 -
Fix Bad Links in Google
I have a client who had some grey hat SEO done in the past. Some of their back links aren't from the best neighborhoods. Google didn't seem to mind until 9/28, when they literally disappeared for all searches except for their domain name. Google still has their site indexed, but it's just not showing up. There are no messages in Webmaster Tools. I know Bing has the tool where you can disavow bad links and ask them to discount them. Google doesn't have such a tool, but what is the strategy when you don't have control over the link sources, such as in blog comments? Could this update have been a delayed Penguin ranking change from the latest Penguin Update on the 18th? http://www.seomoz.org/google-algorithm-change Any advice would be greatly appreciated. Thanks, Tom
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | TomBristol0 -
Big Brands Still Paying For Links!
We have been spending a lot of time creating unique and relevant content that is helpful to users in order to garner natural links. However, I still see large companies getting paid links to their site. They still rank despite the paid links - many higher that before thanks to the increased brand/domain authority bias by Google. I have seen a number of blogs with posts that have dofollow links to sites like Amazon and Dirtdevil. Are small businesses just getting buried or am I being too cynical?
White Hat / Black Hat SEO | | inhouseseo0