Site wide footer links vs. single link for websites we design

[nbeske]

I’ve been running a web design business for the past 5 years, 90% or more of the websites we build have a “web design by” link in the footer which links back to us using just our brand name or the full “web design by brand name” anchor text.

I’m fully aware that site-wide footer links arent doing me much good in terms of SEO, but what Im curious to know is could they be hurting me? More specifically I’m wondering if I should do anything about the existing links or change my ways for all new projects, currently we’re still rolling them out with the site-wide footer links.

I know that all other things being equal (1 link from 10 domains > 10 links from 1 domain) but is (1 link from 10 domains > 100 links from 10 domains)?

I’ve got a lot of branded anchor text, which balances out my exact match and partial match keyword anchors from other link building nicely. Another thing to consider is that we host many of our clients which means there are quite a few on the same server with a shared IP.

Should I?

1.) Go back into as many of the sites as I can and remove the link from all pages except the home page or a decent PA sub page- keeping a single link from the domain.

2.) Leave all the old stuff alone but start using the single link method on new sites.

3.) Scratch the site credit and just insert an exact-match anchor link in the body of the home page and hide with with CSS like my top competitor seems to be doing quite successfully. (kidding of course.... but my competitor really is doing this.)

[NeilD]

We have generated new business from links that we have on client sites linking back to us. The new client will call/email us saying "we see you did example.com website, which we like, would you mind quoting for a redesign our website".  Without that link we may never have got that new piece of business.

We always ask the client if we can place on link on their website and they all say ok. We don't do this for purely for SEO. The only thing we have done previously is to include the link in the footer of every page on the client site, which we are now in the process of changing to being only the client home page.

With that in mind, is the following ok to do?

1. Place text/image link in footer of client home page

2. Link to be "nofollow" which goes to specific page on our own website e.g. oursite.com/portfolio/clientname.php

3. on oursite.com/portfolio/clientname.php page we link back to client's home page, again this would be a "nofollow"

[AlanBleiweiss]

Whether you have a site-wide link with exact match keywords, or even your design company's name, this is squarely in the "over-optimization" realm.  Created intentionally or not originally, it's now a best practice from an SEO perspective to eliminate site-wide links of any type pointing to a 3rd party site.

Hiding them with CSS is not recommended, as this too is potentially going to be seen as an attempt to fool people or search engines.

Purely from a "credit" perspective, if your clients are amenable to having a link to your site, it should either be on the home page footer, on the "About" page in the lower part of the content area, or another similar page.

If you have not been penalized for site-wide links, be aware that regardless of your or other people's experience at this point, it's on the radar for being targeted for its negative implications.

[Unity]

I've found it interesting reading this thread and seeing 'these' links from a different point of view. When auditing client sites I always recommend removing the web designers link from the footer (or at least from the homepage) because that link doesn't help my clients.

If you are trying to get a link from the client it is going to be much better for you if the page is thematically in line with your website. You'd need to think creatively for this because I'm sure if they had web design ability they wouldn't need your services so similar content will be tricky! A couple of ideas: Perhaps your clients have a section/page of 'random' information where you can supply a paragraph of text about your website and add the link there. Perhaps they have a cool graphic or infographic that you created and they wouldn't mind adding a paragraph under it in smaller font? Perhaps you could do a contra deal, a page about you for 2 hours labor.

But, to make a choice from your options a single homepage link is going to be more worthwhile than footer links and I wouldn't use the same anchor text for all of your links.

[kadesmith]

Must have been a really good TV show.

There's not much in SEO that is more fun to watch than a competitor take a hit like that. Maybe achieving rank #1 for a competitive term.

Nothing worse in SEO than taking a hit like that.

[nbeske]

I appreciate the insight. I've been consistently #2, though the #1 spot bounces around quite a bit- I've had at least 5 different competitors there at one time or another. My favorite though was when the long time double-hyphen .tv domain that ranked #1 got knocked down to page 4 after Panda.

[Bryan_Loconto]

Having site wide links like that can look like they may have been paid for.

"I know that all other things being equal (1 link from 10 domains > 10 links from 1 domain) but is (1 link from 10 domains > 100 links from 10 domains)?"

1 link that gets relevant traffic to your site is worth more than 100 links that are not relevant to your site. It's not about how many links it's all about what type of content created that link. In other words building a natural linking profile is not link building, it's creating real content and sharing it with the right people who will help that article get real natural links.

[kadesmith]

#3 is the most obvious choice to implement.

All joking aside, I use to run a web design business and the majority of links I had were footer, site wide links.  I still have my site up even though I do very little anymore and haven't focused on any SEO for the site in a long, long time.  After the Penguin/Panda hype, I jumped from page 2 to top 3 consistently for keywords I was once targeting.

I don't know if it was just that my competitors had spammy link profiles or what, but for me in this case site wide footer links seemed to be all I needed.  Take it for what you will.