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
-
Do links from International SEO counterpart site carry weight?
Hi everyone! One of our clients has a competitor who has an international reach with their website. Their hreflang goes from Brazil, German, US, China, etc. We found that the Chinese site (.cn) sends over 900,000+ backlinks to the main US site (.com). The hreflang for the site has the .com US version of the site as the canonical. So my question is - does our competitor get any link equity from the 900,000 links they are getting from their Chinese (.cn) version of the site? My initial thought is that because they are marked up with hreflang and canonical tags, those 900,000+ links wouldn't' have any equity? Would love some thoughts/guidance on what others think.
Link Building | | JKhoo0 -
Nofollow links can hurt site rankings ?
can irrelevant nofollow links hurt site rankings? our website is about selling perfumes ... https://janraber.com/
Link Building | | hiseo770 -
Document download sites linking to my site. Should I disavow?
I downloaded my links through the Google Webmaster site and I have a number of new links that appear to be coming from document download sites. They have basically taken my PDFs and have them to where they can be downloaded. They are also linking back to my site and creating what I feel are sketchy links. I don't actually want traffic coming to these PDFs. They are basically sample articles for my writing company and it's just a portfolio. Here's one of the links: http://www.give-me-doc.com/Trailer-Brake-Types.pdf So, what or can I do about them? Should I disavow them? Any suggestions would be appreciated. Thanks,
Link Building | | wordsyouwant
Valerie0 -
Why does my site only have 4 internal followed links/internal links?
When using Open Site Explorer my site is winning in many categories but lacking in others as compared to competitors. I intend to improve on this but am a little confused by the extremely low number of "internal followed links" and "internal links" at just 4. My competitors have much more than that. Does this mean links to the root domain? Total internal links? I have many internal links so I'm having a hard time figuring this one out. What four internal links are getting noticed? I just went through and changed all the links that went to index.html to link to the root domain at www.njlimocarservice.com as I just found a Q&A that indicates this was better. So as of Wed at 5:45 PM all my links to the homepage went to index.html and not the root which is no longer the case. Not sure if this matters. At the same time I also just put a 301 from index.html to redirect to www.njlimocarservice.com. Any help appreciated! h9QuF.png
Link Building | | kabledesigns0 -
Why my twitter handle link is not getting counted in links, though for other sites it is counting!
My twitter handle page link is not getting counted, though it is getting counted for other sites
Link Building | | EG0CENTRIX0 -
Link Building for relaunched & newly designed site
Hey all, Next week we are relaunching our brand spankin' new site. It's a major overhaul of our existing site from both a brand, design, and identity point of view. As part of the relaunch we will be reaching out to journalists in our niche with PR, and also doing a series of guest posts. But I'm wondering about other link building opportunities around newly redesigned websites. I have a list of about 2 dozen design + CSS galleries to submit to. Can you recommend other sources? I'm especially interested in sites that review web design, etc... Thanks. C.
Link Building | | cmoylan1 -
Linking to Adsense heavy sites?
Hi SEOmoz community! Hopefully a pretty straight forward question here... Does anyone know if linking to "Adsense heavy" websites can have a negative impact on your rankings? Or a positive impact even? Thes sites in particular are owned by a business aquintance, so they come from a trusted source even though the sites themselves look quite "spammy". Also they all have pagerank of 1 or 2 and there's about 100 of the sites that we would link to. Does anyone have any thoughts? Regards, Ash 🙂
Link Building | | AshSEO20110 -
Linking to root domain or specific sub-site
Hello, When optimizing for multiple keywords, should I try to get links back to the root domain of the company I work with, or would it be better to link back to sub-sites specific to the keyword I am optimizing for? Does 'getting the root up' help all keywords I work with? Cheers, Mike
Link Building | | Malarowski0