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.
Site wide footer links vs. single link for websites we design
-
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.)
-
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?
-
Place text/image link in footer of client home page
-
Link to be "nofollow" which goes to specific page on our own website e.g. oursite.com/portfolio/clientname.php
-
on oursite.com/portfolio/clientname.php page we link back to client's home page, again this would be a "nofollow"
-
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
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.
-
#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.
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
-
Breaking up a site into multiple sites
Hi, I am working on plan to divide up mid-number DA website into multiple sites. So the current site's content will be divided up among these new sites. We can't share anything going forward because each site will be independent. The current homepage will change to just link out to the new sites and have minimal content. I am thinking the websites will take a hit in rankings but I don't know how much and how long the drop will last. I know if you redirect an entire domain to a new domain the impact is negligible but in this case I'm only redirecting parts of a site to a new domain. Say we rank #1 for "blue widget" on the current site. That page is going to be redirected to new site and new domain. How much of a drop can we expect? How hard will it be to rank for other new keywords say "purple widget" that we don't have now? How much link juice can i expect to pass from current website to new websites? Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | timdavis0 -
Two websites vs each other owned by same company
My client owns a brand and came to me with two ecommerce websites. One website sells his specific brand product and the other sells general products in his niche (including his branded product). Question is my client wants to rank each website for basically the same set of keywords. We have two choices I'd like feedback on- Choice 1 is to rank both websites for same keyword groupings so even if they are both on page 1 of the serps then they take up more real estate and share of voice. are there any negative possibilities here? Choice 2 is to recommend a shift in the position of the general industry website to bring it further away from the industry niche by focusing on different keywords so they don't compete with each other in the serps. I'm for choice 1, what about you?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Rich_Coffman0 -
Website Redesign, 301 Redirects, and Link Juice
I want to change my client’s ecommerce site to Shopify. The only problem is that Shopify doesn’t let you customize domains. I plan to: keep each page’s content exactly the same keep the same domain name 301 redirect all of the pages to their new url The ONLY thing that will change is each page’s url. Again, each page will have the exact same content. The only source of traffic to this site is via Google organic search and sales depend on the traffic. There are about 10 pages that have excellent link juice, 20 pages that have medium link juice, and the rest is small link juice. Many of our links that have significant link juice are on message boards written by people that like our product. I plan to change these urls and 301 redirect them to their new urls. I’ve read tons of pages online about this topic. Some people that say it won’t effect link juice at all, some say it will might effect link juice temporarily, and others are uncertain. Most answers tend to be “You should be good. You might lose some traffic temporarily. You might want to switch some of your urls to the new structure to see how it affects it first.” Here’s my question: 1) Has anyone ever done changed a url structure for an existing website with link juice? What were your results and do you have a definitive answer on the topic? 2) How much link juice (if any) will be lost if I keep all of the exact content the same but only change each page’s url? 3) If link juice is temporarily lost and then regained, how long will it be temporarily lost? 1 week? 1 month? 6 months? Thanks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | kirbyf0 -
Subdomains vs directories on existing website with good search traffic
Hello everyone, I operate a website called Icy Veins (www.icy-veins.com), which gives gaming advice for World of Warcraft and Hearthstone, two titles from Blizzard Entertainment. Up until recently, we had articles for both games on the main subdomain (www.icy-veins.com), without a directory structure. The articles for World of Warcraft ended in -wow and those for Hearthstone ended in -hearthstone and that was it. We are planning to cover more games from Blizzard entertainment soon, so we hired a SEO consultant to figure out whether we should use directories (www.icy-veins.com/wow/, www.icy-veins.com/hearthstone/, etc.) or subdomains (www.icy-veins.com, wow.icy-veins.com, hearthstone.icy-veins.com). For a number of reason, the consultant was adamant that subdomains was the way to go. So, I implemented subdomains and I have 301-redirects from all the old URLs to the new ones, and after 2 weeks, the amount of search traffic we get has been slowly decreasing, as the new URLs were getting index. Now, we are getting about 20%-25% less search traffic. For example, the week before the subdomains went live we received 900,000 visits from search engines (11-17 May). This week, we only received 700,000 visits. All our new URLs are indexed, but they rank slightly lower than the old URLs used to, so I was wondering if this was something that was to be expected and that will improve in time or if I should just go for subdomains. Thank you in advance.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | damienthivolle0 -
Effect of Removing Footer Links In all Pages Except Home Page
Dear MOZ Community: In an effort to improve the user interface of our business website (a New York CIty commercial real estate agency) my designer eliminated a standardized footer containing links to about 20 pages. The new design maintains this footer on the home page, but all other pages (about 600 eliminate the footer). The new design does a very good job eliminating non essential items. Most of the changes remove or reduce the size of unnecessary design elements. The footer removal is the only change really effect the link structure. The new design is not launched yet. Hoping to receive some good advice from the MOZ community before proceeding My concern is that removing these links could have an adverse or unpredictable effect on ranking. Last Summer we launched a completely redesigned version of the site and our ranking collapsed for 3 months. However unlike the previous upgrade this modifications does not URL names, tags, text or any major element. Only major change is the footer removal. Some of the footer pages provide good (not critical) info for visitors. Note the footer will still appear on the home page but will be removed on the interior pages. Are we risking any detrimental ranking effect by removing this footer? Can we compensate by adding text links to these pages if the links from the footer are removed? Seems irregular to have a home page footer but no footer on the other pages. Are we inviting any downgrade, penalty, adverse SEO effect by implementing this? I very much like the new design but do not want to risk a fall in rank and traffic. Thanks for your input!!!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Kingalan1
Alan0 -
Can I dissavow links on a 301'd website?
So we are performing link removal for a client on his old website (A), which is being 301 redirected to his new website (B). We have identified toxic links on site A and are removing, once complete we will undo the current 301, confirm a new GWT account for website A, and then submit the disavow report. We would then like to reapply the 301 redirect to site B while we are waiting for Google to process the disavow report, the logic being we can retain some current rankings on site B while waiting for the disavow to process on site A. Has anyone had experience with this method? I foresee some potential issues here but am interested to here from others on this. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | SEOdub1 -
How to find affiliate sites linking to a competitor website?
Hello here, I am trying to understand the best way to find sites that are affiliate of a competitor, through link research. Typically our competitor's affiliates link to our competitor website via any of the following links: http://www.musicnotes.com/sheetmusic/ard.asp?SID=[aff_id]&LID=[link_id] http://click.linksynergy.com/link?id=[aff+id]&offerid=[off_id]&type=2&murl=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.musicnotes.com%2Fsheetmusic%2Fmtd.asp%3Fppn%3D[item_id] The first link looks much easier to find, so I have tried to find the first kind of links with Google by using the "link:" clause as follows: link:http://www.musicnotes.com/sheetmusic/ard.asp Or, similarly, by using Open Site Explorer. But I always get 0 results! It is weird because I know there are thousands of affiliates out there with the same tracking code. How's that possible? Why does it look impossible to find the sites I am looking for? Would you suggest any different approach? Any ideas, suggestions and thoughts are very welcome! Thank you in advance. Fab.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | fablau0 -
Should the sitemap include just menu pages or all pages site wide?
I have a Drupal site that utilizes Solr, with 10 menu pages and about 4,000 pages of content. Redoing a few things and we'll need to revamp the sitemap. Typically I'd jam all pages into a single sitemap and that's it, but post-Panda, should I do anything different?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | EricPacifico0
