Following Penguin, what is the best practice for a web design agency placing a footer link in client sites?
-
For years we have included a 'Web Design by ...' link in the footer of all client websites designed by us.
However, following the Penguin update, it seems that this legitimate practice could now be penalised.
Should we be removing those links from our client's sites? There are tens of thousands, all with similar or identical text!
For future client sites, should we avoid these footer links altogether? Or maybe limit the link to a single page on each site?
-
I know this almost a year after it was asked, but since I was doing a little research, I thought I'd provide a solution I came up with.
When I design a site, I want an attribution link on every page. I can't rely on a visitor saying "I love this site, who designed it?" 3 levels deep, not finding an attribution at the bottom, then thinking that they'd find it on the home page. It doesn't even make good usability sense.
So here's what I set out to do with my sites moving forward:
Still doing Sitewide links, but only the link on the Home Page will be followed. All other links will be NoFollowed.
If you use WordPress, you can use the following conditional statement. (Of course you'll want to replace your own Anchor Text and URL (unless you design pretty websites and want to give me the credit ).
if ( is_front_page() ) { echo "[](;</span><span style=) [ echo "http://flauntyoursite.com";
echo ">Flaunt Your Site](;</span><span style=)";} else {
echo "[
echo "http://flauntyoursite.com";](;</span><span style=)[
echo " rel=";
echo "nofollow";
echo ">Flaunt Your Site](;</span><span style=)";
} ?>It's important to leave the Space between the " and the rel=" otherwise it will collapse the url into something not readable and give you a 404 when you try to click it.
Hope this helps some of you.
-
Since when does SEO = manipulation of the search engines? I take offense to that. This is my career.
Instead of trying to get your link on the client's homepage, you could have your attribution link in the footer lead to a deep deep page on the client's site. On that page link to your company's site. Make the link to your site no-follow and you should be good to go.
-
What I am taking from this thread and associated ones, is that no-one knows for sure what the best practice to avoid possible penalisation is. In this scenario caution is the best approach I guess? Removing links with 'SEO' as part of the anchor text is a no-brainer, this advertises to the search engines that our Clients use these services and are actively trying to manipulate the search engines.
Beyond this the advice seems to be that using our brand name in the anchor text should be fine, the link should open in a new window and we should avoid placing our links in the footer. Placing the link on the Homepage somewhere is preferable.
Thanks to all
-
It would basically end up as reciprocal links though. Not really benefiting any party. Web design agencies use footer links for their own benefit, as a former web designer I used to do this as well, although I only linked on brand and not as many designers do just now on keywords like 'web design by' or 'website designed by' and not their brand.
Many designers do link back to their clients in the form of portfolios and case studies, but generally not in the footer.
-
I take your point regarding the nofollow tag, and those footer links are certainly useful ways for humans to discover your agency through a client's site.
However, if I am completely honest, those links have always been placed there with SEO in mind. More incoming links to our site with our carefully chosen keywords boosted our rankings. That's what we were taught, and it was always encouraged. If a human happened to find us via one of those links, that was just a bonus.
Of course this goes against Google's 'design for humans, not for search engines' thing, but for years it has been a standard, accepted practice to 'optimise' those incoming links. And now it is suddenly dishonest - it turns out we've been manipulating Google's results, cheating our way to better rankings.
To me, those 'web design by [agency]' footer links don't feel wrong. They are truthful words, linking to a genuine agency who did the web design. For those reasons I still feel that we should be entitled to any SEO benefit, not adding nofollow like we are doing something criminal.
I need to get my head around this, and it may take some time. Are all incoming links for SEO purposes now evil?
-
I'm surprised no one has mentioned the nofollow tag here. Technically, regardless of the anchor text used, you are still making a self-made link when you put that attribution link on your client's site. Self-made link = manipulation... well sort of. Just make the link nofollow and you should be good to go.
We've gotten lots of business through attribution links. Our clients don't mind that they're there.
-
We do link back to clients through Case Studies and Our Portfolio pages. I think many agencies do this. Although the footer may not be the best place if you have hundreds of clients!
-
I've always wondered why web design companies are not placing site wide links to their clients in the footers of their own sites. Would that not be helpful to their clients and also be a good thing to do? Certainly more visitors to a web design site would be interested in clicking those links to see samples of web design than would visitors to a car repair site be interested in going to web design?
-
Thank you both.
In summary :
-
Use only your brand name in anchor text when linking from client websites
-
A single link from a clients home page is probably better than linking from every page.
Sounds like good advice
-
-
you should possibly try going down the route of having a single link on your clients websites, on the homepage. You want Google to pass good link-juice back to your site, by having 1000x links pointing from every page on a domain back to your site looks like spam and will probably not even be of any value. Your current site probably has tens of thousands of links coming in from only a handful of unique domains.
-
Yes Lewis, A single link on the home page of each site, sounds a better solutions to avoid too many links.
Thanks,
-
Thank you for your response. We are happy to use our brand name in links, although our brand name is actually 'New Forest Web Design', which could still be seen as spammy because The New Forest is the area we trade and Web Design is a service, so Google could see our brand as '[area] Web Design'. Our actual company name is 'New Forest Web Design Ltd', so I guess we should use that?
Also, is it better to have a single link on a client's site, rather than on every page? Some dynamic sites could end up with thousands of links pointing to us. I was thinking that a single link on the home page of each site may be better?
-
Change them to your brand. Avoid using exact match type competitive keywords like 'web design by..' Google does not penalise exatc brand mentions so much as most commercial websites are expected to receive numerous exact match brand links anyway.
-
Hello Lewis,
I hope i understand you question. and here is what you can do in future.
you can give a link to your site from your company name or domain. Its a fair thing. Avoid getting links from keywords like web designing company, web designing company in city kind of words. you can write that site is designed and developed by company and can give a link to your site from that company name.
If you can remove the link form whole statement and give a link from your brand name I think it will benefit you more. if they are like thousands in numbers start with few good sites and do it gradually as you get time. so it will not harm your link graph and anchor text too.
Thanks
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
-
Do you disavow all the links on the WhatsApp Gold site?
Do you disavow all the links on the WhatsApp Gold site? https://www.watsabgold.com/
Link Building | | JackBarrie0 -
How Long for Penguin Recovery if All Links Were Removed at Once?
Hi, I was wondering if anyone had thoughts on length of time before a Penguin recovery can take place, assuming you removed all the bad links at once? I have a client that has a Penguin penalty, with all the bad links pointing in to a domain, which then redirected to theirs. So, I simply had that domain removed and it now returns a 404 instead of redirecting to the main site. Now all of the bad backlinks do not pass through. All of this happened at once about 5 weeks ago. I was glad to discover such an easy solution, but am wondering how long something like this would take. My initial thought was it would take 2 or 3 months to see recovery, but I was hoping since the issue was fixed so quickly, recovery would be faster. Any experience with Penguin recoveries with all spam links removed (less that 100 links) at once?
Link Building | | wiredseo0 -
Link building for a non-linkable site?
Hello, I am trying to zone in on a link building strategy for a non-linkable site. What I mean by non-linkable is I have a construction site. It's a family owned and operated small business. Our clients are farmers and older people usually. We go do a job, do it right the first time, and leave. Basically even if a couple of people who link to me for some weird reason, this is no way in the realm of 6,000 that my main competition has. I have tried to get as many quality citation resources as possible by using get listed, and white spark. My domain authority is only 16 though, so I must be able to increase this somehow. I have listed with Google +, Bing, Yahoo and every other major citation I could find. So now with trying too increase links with other ideas. I read somewhere to donate to charitable organizations, but if they link back to me as a donor, in an unrelated field, isn't that spammy like? So a construction site donating to a disease website, and then getting a backlink in return, does that look weird. It just seems like there are so many rules that I do not want to mess something up. I do not want get spammy links, but not sure if citations count as links so I am doing a win-win thing? Thanks for any tips Chris
Link Building | | asbchris0 -
What do you when the wrong site links to you?
In doing research of our backlink profile, I've found a couple dozen of links from off-topic websites linking to us. You see, our domain is Voices.com and tends to scoop up links from unrelated sites that are clearly trying to link to another site such as evp-voices.com or areavoices.com or dozens of others. What would you do? Ask the webmaster to remove them because they are completely unrelated? Or would you keep them if you believed they aren't causing any harm?
Link Building | | voicesdotcom0 -
Total Links vs Google Webmaster Site Links
I am interested why the numbers between SEOmoz and Google are so different. In SEOmoz we only show 17,000ish links from 190ish domains. In Google, we show 200,000+ links from 370 domains. Why is there such a dramatic difference?
Link Building | | webspecdesign0 -
Penguin Recover: Remove links vs Burry Links
The best is to do both. However with those with limited resources, would building more links with branded and naked URL anchor links be a better solution than painstakingly asking every webmaster to remove links.
Link Building | | reprisemedia10 -
Tips on the best free tools or techniques to promote your site
Hi i would like to know after receiving lots of email about tools to help with seo and promoting your site and would like to know if anyone has used any as yet. I have kept away from paid tools as i have been reading that they are a waste of time but would like to know your thoughts. I would also like to know if there are any good free tools out there to use to help make your site better and increase traffic and if there are any techniques or sites that i should be using any advice would be great
Link Building | | ClaireH-1848860