Just found an interesting post in webmaster world that kinda answers how Google may feel about these typs of links.

http://www.webmasterworld.com/google/4445558.htm

This is going to mess up a lot of Web Design firms if they start to enforce this.

Dan, thanks for getting involved in the discussion. It is funny that most design firms carry out this practice and I have never heard it discussed before. I will have to look into using a micro format for this as I had not thought about that before. I guess we will soon find out what role that plays in appears as part of a "link scheme" or not with the new update rolling out soon. Thanks again.

1. Yes

2. No, they only link to our main web design/seo site. Not us to them except in some cases where we have a case study for example.

3.Not as many as we would like But to honestly answer your question I would say say our clients make up 1/2 of our link profile and many of them are in the global footer so are sitewide.

4. Probably 20 sites right now

We are only using branded company name in anchor text. Thanks for the feedback.

With the recent updates to the algorithm having to do with link networks and over optimization it has got me to thinking about the footer links we add to each site that we build and do web design for linking back to ours. I could certainly see how Google could make the assumption that these are all on the same server, pointing back to one main site, and penalize us for that. Should we no=follow these links? They may say something like, "Website Designed By: Company Name". They do provide a valuable source to some extent of traffic to the site from people interested in our designs. Any thoughts?