Should You Get Link back from Customers
-
In the SEO guide on Moz, it states as one of the link building strategies:
Get your customers to link to you
If you have partners you work with regularly, or loyal customers that love your brand, you can capitalize on this by sending out partnership badges—graphic icons that link back to your site (like Google often does with their AdWords certification program). Just as you'd get customers wearing your t-shirts or sporting your bumper stickers, links are the best way to accomplish the same feat on the web.
We design websites for churches and non-profits, and put a link back to our site as the designer. We recently have been told this is spammy and not a good idea. However, from what MOZ says, it sounds like they are promoting you do this.
Please comment. Thanks.
-
Thank you SO much for raising this question!
The Beginner's Guide To SEO is currently being updated and will address exactly this.
Google's John Mueller has stated in the past that it's ok to put a link on a client's site back to yours as long as it's rel="nofollow". When I was previously self-employed at Pryde Marketing, and heard Google state this, we instantly changed our client footer "Made by Pryde Marketing" links to rel="nofollow" and almost immediately saw organic improvements. I can't say for certain that changing our client > Pryde links to "nofollow" 100% caused this, but it didn't hurt.
My personal opinion is that you can benefit from clients linking back to your site in a credible way (ex. If you built their website) and have a rel="nofollow", you will be fine. If you reverse engineer any of the top web developer's sites, you'll likely see quite a few "built by xyz" linking back to their domains.
-
Good points, Julie. Thanks to all of you who responded:-)
-
Do your own research to see if it works in your market.
When I reverse engineer the other local digital agencies in the SERPS, links from clients often seem to be their only link building strategy. We've all read that Google doesn't like it, or some people think it's spammy. I think that most of what we hear from Google and the many gurus is designed as advice for Fortune 500 companies. If you're working with a dozen small customers, what works for Fortune 500 won't work for you, so don't accept their guidelines as gospel.
-
There are two things two consider:
REAL WORLD:
If your work is flawless enough that in and of itself is a living breathing advertisement for you, by all means you may want to give yourself a no follow link, so visitors there see that you have made the masterpiece if they are interested any further in your work...
GOOGLE WORLD:
If you give yourself a link that is a regular FOLLOWEd link, then you are doing your site a disservice by making your anchor text profile more spammy. but i do not see how a no-follow link can hurt anything on this side.
risk is all yours.
-
Is there any rule that if MOZ suggest, then it is true ?
-
Then just wondering why MOZ is suggesting it?
-
I think this still looks like a spammy method
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
-
When conducting a link building strategy does it matter the country the link is from?
We are a UK business and if we have links mostly from US based blogs and websites does this penalise us. The links are from relevant websites and topics. Should we be focusing on .co.uk sites
Link Building | | Caffeine_Marketing1 -
Inbound link is follow link but we put no follow link back - is it beneficial for rankings?
Dear Moz Community, We are operating in a niche market, where there are not so many content marketing options. What we are left with are link exchanging with relevant sites that are on the same topic but to not directly compete with us. Now we know that if we link back to site A and site a links back to us - for google this is not a very good link. But, some of the sites we are exchanging links with, do not know the term follow vs no follow links. My question - if your link is to site A is a no follow link but they give us a follow link - does it mean thats a better option than a follow vs follow. Thanks for help!
Link Building | | advertisingcloud0 -
A website with a spam score of 5 is back linking to me. How important is to get that link removed?
There is a website that OSE has identified with a spam score of 5, it back links to me with a very specific key word. How important is it to have them remove those links?
Link Building | | absoauto0 -
What to do when you get an oh so sweet but temporary link?
Hello! We recently received a great link from a local university. My colleague did a few presentations at the university, so they were nice enough to turn a mention of our company name on their academics page into a link when we asked. The problem is that we've been told that the mention/link will disappear after about a month. So, my questions: Can we do anything to further exploit that link in the short time we have? My colleague brought up doing some kind of funky link pyramid thing where we create links to that page, which would possibly give us even more link juice. I know nothing about this sort of thing. Is it recommended/not recommended? Is there anything we could possibly do to preserve the link in Google's index and have it still count in our favor after it's taken down? Maybe some kind of crazy iframe magic trick? Thanks!!
Link Building | | BBEXNinja0 -
How can a not so passionate subject get links? Need ideas?
Our client owns a very big pest control site. They are competing with pestmall, orkin, terminex to name a few. Almost all of there competitors are spamming like crazy. For some of their competitors it is working. They get natural links very slowly. Maybe 1 natural link every week. How can a not so passionate subject get links? Here was my ideas. Offer a tool to pest control sites for a link in return. The flaw is most pest control company owners are not tech savy and if they are they have hired it out. I just really need some ideas. Thank you.
Link Building | | OxzenMedia0 -
Do VigLink links get indexed, and then pass SEO juice to the merchant?
You can find the service at viglink.com, they do dynamic linking to anchor text for participating publishers on a cost-per-click basis. Less interested here in the conversion quality and more interested in the broad SEO value. Any ideas?
Link Building | | SimpliSafe0 -
Are In bound links to a Custom URL ineffective
Hi All, I would like to know what would achieve the best inbound link ranking from google. I have to run an inbound link campaign and have to choose between two options: Option 1, get people to link directly to the home page or Option 2, get people to link to a custom url (for example, www.domain.com/index.aspx?dealer1455) the custom url has a function to hide certain menu items on the home page. Also The custom url ID number will also change for each person that links to us. So in effect each link is directed to an individual custom URL. My preference is option 1. But a number of the people linking to us would prefer to link to a custom home page that has their competitors details hidden. At the end of the day the decision needs to be made on what will provide our site with the best rankings in the serps What option is best to improve search engine rankings ? Many Thanks in advance
Link Building | | SaimanRhino0