How Can I Outlink Web Designer Link Building from Their Clients' Footer
-
_I used open site explorer to view the backlinks for a competitor of an agency I work with. They have ten times as many links, if not more, than we do, and I noticed there were only a few more domains linking back to them. As I dug deeper I noticed these links were coming from the footer tag they put on their clients' sites like "Site Designed by __." If a site had 20 pages, they had 20 links back...weird and annoying that it counts.
They have more clients for web design than we do, so their bulk linking could continue to outrank us. Any suggestions on how we can outrank them locally? We are in the midst of redesigning our entire site to build out more pages and have much better internal linking.
Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks everyone!
-
Nofollow links still pass some authority, but no where near an in body link. I commented on blogs like Website Magazine, and a few other real high authority blogs. I just used my actual name, and didn't try optimize the link.
Ranking for web design is definitely a little different because of inflated numbers. You should also keep in my that link analysis tools, like Moz and Majestic, don't find every link on the internet, and can take a while to discover some links. Always take these stats with a grain of salt, and focus on getting quality links.
If you are working local you can always try identify links pages in your area. I was able to get one from a couple historical societies and a mall just by asking for it. You can also have a link in your signature on forums, but try to limit these since too many would look spammy.
-
It is very frustrating when you see something like that - things you know are "wrong" but a competitor gets away with it.
I am going to skip the whole preaching about "don't worry too much about competitors or what they do" thing, and point out that if you are going to count/compare links, it is best to look at number of linking domains rather than total links.
100 sitewide footer credit links from one site is not really the same as 100 links from 100 different sites.
-
Thanks for the quick reply Who Wudda Thunk. You said you used just a handful of nofollow links, which sounds contradictory to me. Were these links in comment sections of high profile sites, forums, or simply in-body links from high ranking blogs/news sites?
Sorry I sound oblivious, but this is the first time I ran into an issue with the footer links. I usually go against other local small businesses that I can outrank.
-
Matt Cutts has talked about the diminishing returns of multiple links from a single domain. His video says that anything after 2 gets to be pretty minimal.
The other thing you need to consider is that site wide footer links aren't as strong as an in body link. If you are doing your part to get legitimate in body links, through interviews or contributing to a blog in some way, then you are going to get farther than these site wides.
I ran into a similar problem with one of my sites. I was up against a dozen web designers who have built hundreds of websites, but I was able to outrank them with just a handful of nofollow links. They weren't great at on site SEO, which helped, but I knew that a lot of these links weren't worth much.
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
-
What's the best way to create keyword tracking lists for local SEO?
I have a question for the local SEO crowd: when it comes to creating keyword tracking lists, what are your best practices in reference to tracking from a set location? Do you typically create national keyword lists that include the location operator in each term or are you better creating a list of locally-tracked keywords around a business' location and dropping the location operator from the keyword? Or some combination of the two? To clarify, if I had an example business of a realtor in Chatham, MA, would I want to track -"realtor in chatham ma" (national)
Local SEO | | formandfunctionagency
-"realtor in chatham ma" (with the location set to Chatham, MA)
-"realtor" (with the location set to Chatham, MA) Or some combination of all of the above? Right now, I track waaaay too many keyword variants on my local campaigns! Hoping there's a better way from some more-seasoned Moz users. Thanks in advance!2 -
If I kill off the franchisee websites and create a corp SEO monster...will my Company's SEO suffer? Pros and Cons?
Our 25 franchisees sell one product of our 7 within the Corporate porfolio. We getting ready to release a brand new corp website employing all the best possible SEO practices. Since the franchisee's barely maintain their 3-page website...we are thinking of killing them off. We will create some market pages on the Corp side and continue to use HubSpot to pass along leads to the individual franchisees. Corporate has robust Content Marketing strategy in place. Any suggestions? Cases studies?
Local SEO | | Joseph.Lusso0 -
Find high DA link opportunities in your local area
Hi, part of my link building strategy is ideally going to be from outreach to local businesses. I run a local service business operating in multiple locations (with no physical base). I have created local landing pages on which I'm showcasing local businesses and photographers (relevant not in terms of industry but location). Its my intention to show off their business as best I can, then get in touch to say "hey, we love what you're doing with X product/service, check out our site here [link]. We'd love it if you could link to us etc etc". Assuming that this is a valid strategy, what is the best way to find locally relevant sites with the highest domain authority?
Local SEO | | Cleanily0 -
Please tell me why we can't outrank a competitor with such poor metrics
Hi ! New here I'm trying to help a customer rank in the 1st page on a low-mid competition term in a specific city. I did a comparison of both URL in MOZ "Compare link Metrics" & we beat them on 85% of the metrics. They are on the 1st page, often top-3, the closest position we can get is about 13-15. The only higher metric they have is Domain MozRank & MozTrust + equity passing link (??) We are running WordPress with Genesis, they are running a custom site. See attached printscreen of the report. Help ! b60HidT
Local SEO | | JohnF80 -
How can you add custom Structured Data to a website hosted on Squarespace?
I have a client with a simple one page landing website hosted on Squarespace. Is there any method to easily apply structured data to this format?
Local SEO | | RosemaryB0 -
Implemented schema.org on our website and it's showing up as being correct but I've been told its wrong- can someone please have a quick look ?
Dear Mozzers, We have implemented schema.org on our website and it's showing up as being correct. However, I've been told by a SEO company that what we have done is incorrect and is therefore giving out wrong signals to google and that it needs fixing but they haven't told me whats wrong with it. Would someone please be able to have to have a quick scan and highlight anything that is not correct. I have enclosed 4 urls belows of the different sections of my website. My website homepage - is -- http://goo.gl/2F80w2 We have a number of branches- An example branch url is - http://goo.gl/8FpcaS example category url - http://goo.gl/gbAaD2 example product url - http://goo.gl/EXI1Sr Any assistance would be greatly appreciated Many thanks
Local SEO | | PeteC12
Peter0 -
Creating an internal link network of clients
I am working with 9 different clients/websites. The websites can be grouped into 2-3 categories, for example, 3 of the websites are related to "Tattoos", another 3 are related to "Local contracting services" Would it be beneficial to create a "Sponsors" page for every website where I write a mini-article of each client and link to them? In other words, every website will have a backlink from the other 8. I already spoke to every client and they are willing to do this, as long as the link to the "Sponsors" page is only accessible in the footer nav. I can't see this hurting the rankings of the sites, but I am not sure if it's better to only include the websites that are categorized the same, or I should include every website.
Local SEO | | brfieger0 -
Have you heard of any white hat methods for influencing Google's auto suggest/auto complete?
We have a client who has a "friend" who says he can get keyword phrases that include their business name to show up in Google's auto suggest when doing a search. We have not heard much about this and are skeptical to these claims as we know how Google comes up with these suggested keyword phrases. Wondering if anyone in the community heard much about tactics to influence auto suggest/auto complete and would like to know your opinion about it.
Local SEO | | CraigSDM0