Moz Q&A is closed.
After more than 13 years, and tens of thousands of questions, Moz Q&A closed on 12th December 2024. Whilst we’re not completely removing the content - many posts will still be possible to view - we have locked both new posts and new replies. More details here.
How good is a backlink that's in the footer
-
Hello,
The strongest site in our industry (according to domain authority and excluding wikipedia) said that they would put a sitewide link to us in their footer. We're good friends with them.
It would be right next to the copyright.
Our site is nlpca (dot) com
The partner site is nlpu (dot) com
The link will say something like "More NLP Training" with the "NLP" as the link. We're targeting the keyword "NLP"
How much will this move us up for the keyword "NLP"? Right now we're on the 3rd page for that term.
I also want to make sure that it's a white hat move.
Thanks!
-
Frankly, sitewide links offer very little value these days to your overall link-profile. The engines simply don't like them as in a lot of cases they scream manipulation.
You might also be interested to know that according to the folks who contributed to the SEOMoz Ranking Factors, the vast majority said that sitewide links would devalue your overall metrics with varying degrees of severity.
Honestly, I'd try to negotiate a better placement and switch tact.
Best,
Anthony -
Ryan,
I value your opinion and Anthony's too.
I will relay the information to my client.
-
Thank you Anthony,
I've had luck with this in the past since it's sitewide.
but I value the SEOMoz metrics.
Any further information you can provide would be great.
-
Hi Bob.
When you receive a link, there are several ways to weigh it's value. Mainly there is the direct value of users who will see the link and click on it to drive traffic to your site. A second consideration is how the link will help you improve search engine rankings.
In this case, you already have a link from the site from their Resources page. More links from the same site wont improve your number of linking root domains, so it wont diversify your link profile in that regard. Footer links are often not seen and rarely actually used. My question to you is, how often do you think a user might see the link and click on it? I would even suggest you test the idea with your analytics.
How much will this move us up for the keyword "NLP"?
Search engine rankings can move for various reasons without your making any change. With that in mind, I don't believe receiving a footer link from this site will have any positive effect on your rankings. With that said, it can't hurt so you are welcome to obtain the link. I would rather suggest you obtain a link in one of the sidebars, or perhaps a content link in their blogs or elsewhere.
-
Hey Bob,
There are a few considerations you need to keep in mind here.
The main one is whether or not this link is going to serve you any real benefit, especially being hidden away in the footer. It's a given that a link in the footer of the site will not serve anywhere near the same value as a link embedded within relevant and high quality original content. The amount of juice it will pass will be minimal in comparison (if that's the goal here).
The search engines have cottoned on to footer links and I feel they associate them with paid links. Whether they offer any real value from an SEO stand-point is not really a debating point within the industry (for further reading read SEOMoz's 2011 Search Engine Ranking Factors). Put yourself in the shoes of a website visitor, are they going to get any major benefit from a link in the footer? Doubtful. And the SE's know this. It's super easy to identify these links and penalise them accordingly.
If I were you I would go back to your partner and try to negotiate a link with a better placement. Even an link positioned within a nice piece of quality content should offer you more benefit than a link slapped in the footer of the site.
Best,
Anthony
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
-
Backlink Transparency with SEO Agency
Hello everyone. I recently started working with an SEO agency and today they gave me an updated keyword report which showed some increase in rankings. I was not aware that any backlinks had been created yet so I asked for a report of the links. Their response is below and I am just wondering if this is normal practice being I have not worked with any type of SEO agency yet. "
Link Building | | wonderd24
Hey Daniel, We release a small report on them which the guest blog team will do soon. We don't reveal all backlink sources unfortunately because people have tried to bother the webmasters we have and basically steal our techniques. But rest assured you will be ranking at the top of the pack with our methods 😃
"1 -
Backlinks from different TLD's impact
Hi MOZ'ers, I'm wondering what the impact of different TLD backlinks is for same language pages. For example: we're on a website that has a German national TLD .de. We're earning backlinks and they are coming from .de as well as .ch (Switzerland) or .at (Austria) pages. What would be more desirable, and how big would you consider the difference? Looking forward to hearing your responses 🙂 Justen
Link Building | | Justen_H0 -
Backlinks from non-relevant site
There's a forum I used to participate in that allows you to include a link to your website in your signature block. I have over 500 posts in the forum so that provides a lot of backlinks to my website. However, I recently decided to remove my website link from my signature for two reasons: The forum is 95-99% dead. Hardly anyone uses it anymore. BTW, the website that houses the forum is still popular within is niche (articles, etc). Just the forum appears to be dead. The website and its forum really have no connection whatsoever to my business. I'm in a completely different niche. However, I have no idea if I've made the right decision. Will removing my signature and the backlinks hurt my site? Or will it help it since the other site really isn't related to mine? Thanks for any thoughts on this!
Link Building | | emh19690 -
Disavow Links - how do you know if it's worked?
I asked another SEO company to analysis my link structure (as I was too busy!) As I was flat lining on some work I was doing. They said I potentially had an algo penalty and that i need to do a disavow , even though I had no messages from Google saying I had unnatural links. stupidly I agreed to the disavow. Looking at Webmasters tools it seems they've submitted a bunch of links. Since they've done this traffic dropped by 60%, ranking dropped massively. In google Webmasters all the links which are meant to be removed are still showing. How do I know if the actual disavow has been done? And should I do a reconsideration request? Even though Google hadn't flagged an issue ??
Link Building | | Cocoonfxmedia0 -
Backlinks through dofollow commenting
I'm interested in building backlinks to my photography business site by leaving good, engaging comments on other photographers' DoFollow blogs. Is this a good idea? Is it worth the effort? Through a little research, I've managed to locate more than 40 dofollow photographer blogs that have a domain authority of 35+. The idea is to take an hour or so a week to leave 10-20 comments on their blog posts. Would you consider this a good strategy? I rank on the first and second page of most of my keywords that I'm working on, but I want to rank 1st or 2nd on them. I used the keyword finder tool on google adwords to find the keywords that are the most searched for in my area. Surprisingly the competition is not large, so I'm fairly comfident I can get there. I've already optimized my site substantially and I'm looking into link building. Thoughts?
Link Building | | studio35design0 -
Links from PRWeb press release violate Google's quality guidelines?
My site has had a manual action performed on it by Google indicating that I have inbound links that fall outside of their quality guidelines. I did my own research, found what I thought was the issue, had the links removed and requested reconsideration. Google's response surprised me in that they highlighted two specific pages with links that were the direct result of valid press releases and a publisher picking up our release off a wire service. Has anyone else seen this occur? Anyone had a case successfully reconsidered? I realize that I don't need to do anything at all as the manual action is in effect and will stay that way, discounting those links, but I would rather a) not have any manual action against my site and b) know for the future so this doesn't happen again. Also, is this applicable for guest blog posts, which effectively create the same type of backlinks? Thanks
Link Building | | barberm1 -
Warrior Forum, Is it good for seo?
The Warrior Forum just changed there membership from free to paid. They have do follow attributes but I was wondering what peoples take is on joining them for both learning and seo purposes?
Link Building | | bronxpad0