Adding web designer credits to properties I create
-
I’m a web designer and I add a “design by studio 35 “ link on the footer of all the web sites I design. By doing so, every page on a website links to me, since the sites I build can have anywhere from 10 to 100 pages (wordpress and shopify).
While this does on occasion get me clients and inquiries, is this affecting the SEO to my site in a good, or in a bad way? Non of the sites are spammy, but many of them have low domain authority since they are typical small businesses and organizations and do no SEO efforts.
Would it be better to add a "site credits" link to a page within a client site, and there add a bit of info and link out? That way, there is only 1 link back to my site?
-
Reason is that there is a real, legitimate value as a developer to have my credit there for users that see the site and would like inquire about having design a similar site. I'm just looking for a way though that this won't affect my own site negatively.
I'm thinking either 1. Do a NoFollow link directly to the site, or 2. Point the link to an internal page on the client site, and from there point to my own site.
-
May be not ignored, but certainly do not pass any search engine ranking value.
-
Hi Dean. What about if those footer links and those site-wide links are no follow? Won't they just be ignored by google?
-
The Rules of Link Building - Whiteboard Friday posted on April 4th, 2014 which advises against this:
Don't link externally in the footer
A couple of other rules that I see people violate all the time that Google has made painfully clear in the past few months: Don't link externally in the footer. Just don't. I'm not going to go into the reasons. Just don't do that.And
Avoid site-wide links
By the same token, except for navigation, avoid site-wide links. This is something that we've known for years. If someone links to you externally, site-wide, in the side bar, that's ripe for Penguin-style links. -
Add the links if you feel you will get referral business from it, but not for SEO value. The link(s) you do add, no follow them. Duane Forrester from Bing stated in a blog post "You want links to surprise you. You should never know in advance a link is coming, or where it’s coming from."
http://www.bing.com/blogs/site_blogs/b/webmaster/archive/2014/05/09/10-seo-myths-reviewed.aspx
This statement was given the general nod by Matt Cutts of Google
https://twitter.com/mattcutts/status/466449897261367296
http://www.seroundtable.com/google-advance-links-18549.html
Finally, I would ask, can you do this in a way that is also beneficial to your client? Is the client getting a discount? Is there a way you can talk about the services this client provides on your site? Can the two of you as local businesses provide additional information to your visitors (more than just the link) that could turn visitors into customers?
Good luck!
-
Funny I just looked this up today trying to help someone here. Basically, you're adding a backlink to your site and I can't find any information to get you a solid answer. In general, you need to consider any link's relevance, reputation, and trust. so if a backlink isn't relevant to the site, will it get flagged as an ad? Might webmaster backlinks be considered paid links?
I did find this Matt Cutts video on footer links https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0fgh5RIHdE and it seems Google can weigh footer links and editorial links differently, and I think that's your answer. But I also came across this article http://blog.ahrefs.com/matt-cutts-says-google-cracking-bloggers-bribed-links/ that's says Google is basically cracking down on the kind of links you're describing.
But at the end of the day, are you getting a significant CTR from these links? If that's the case, nofollow those links and perhaps Google might actually counts them more. Who really knows?
-
I struggle with this too, on the one hand we get referral business from these links but on wmt it shows some sites may have 2000 pages and that can't look good in a search engines eyes. Im cleaning my site up now and in web master tools i had so many pages linking to me from sites that i have done over the years and i think it might be hurting me. I recently started putting no follow links on a lot of the sites that i have built so that potential clients can get to my site but search engines won't crawl them. Hope this helps.
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
-
Web 2.0 Backlinks
Hi Normal Web 2.0 websites like Wordpress.com, blogger.com have very High DA and PA. But when we create a subdomain, DA and PA falls to 1 as Google treats subdomain as new websites. Does it make any sense then to get backlinks from web 2.0 websites? will it help in Google rankings?
Link Building | | aliasgarbabat1234567890 -
Should I create new content or outreach for links for a specific KW?
A few keywords my company would like to go after are: Mobile homes for sale Manufactured homes Mobile Home Dealers. The question is should we create unique content around these keywords then market it heavily in hopes to rank that new individual page / post OR should we just be doing outreach for back links and anchored text to link to our primary domain that is already much stronger with a 38 DA? Thoughts?
Link Building | | Cfarcher0 -
Some web 2.0 sites blocked by robot
I had created some web2.0 sites, google also indexed those sites but those sites robots.txt are disallow, this mean Google will not give any credit on ranking ? I have seen in google, those sites meta description was written - A description of this site is not available due to the robot.txt file. I checked that file, it is written disallow. Can google still count those sites for the ranking purpose ?
Link Building | | pnb5670 -
Is it ok for a web design company to have a branded footer link on their client's sites?
Now I know that in general footer links to your site from another site are bad...this is because they are very often spammy...however I like to think that Google is pretty smart and I am of the opinion that a web design company should be able to link back to their own site. Here's why: If a visitor comes across a site that they love the design of, and they want a new website built...why shouldn't they be able to click through to the web designers site? (as long as the client is happy to link to it of course) I also feel that if there are a whole bunch of high authority/pagerank websites have been designed by a web design company and they therefore have a footer link pointing to them, it's probably a pretty good sign that they're a good web designer. Is it not? In saying this I think that the link anchor text should be branded rather than keywords. For example I usually write "Web Design by Static Shift" I'm interested to hear people's thoughts. Am I being blinded by my bias? Thoughts aside, and onto the facts...what are people's experiences with footer links for a web design company. Do they help or hinder?
Link Building | | Static_Shift3 -
Are link exchanges bad for SEO these days? Also, is adding my site to free yet relevent directory sites a bad idea?
I operate a computer services company in Eugene, Oregon called "Eugene Computer Geeks". We do a lot of web design, and need incoming links to my site very badly. Lately I've been asking clients if they would link to me, but they almost always ask for a link in return. If we exchange links, does Google penalize my site? Would the incoming link be better for SEO if I'm not linking back to the other site? ALSO Is it possible that manually submitting my site to free, yet relevant web directories would hurt my rankings? It's not a big deal to me if it doesn't help my rankings, as I see a benefit to having my site listed, but wanted to make sure there wasn't a chance that it would hurt my rankings. As far as I know all the directories are free from SPAM, porn, warez, or anything like that. Thanks!
Link Building | | eugenecomputergeeks0 -
May links from Google Adsense ads increase my PR?
I wonder, whether a google adsense ad linking to my website is seen by the google robot like a usual do-follow link that increases my pagerank.
Link Building | | schuett0 -
Best to create a new blog as a subsection or as a new site?
Our company has a blog "feature" or "theme" that we'd like to publish every week at least. Should we create a subsection of our current company blog? Or should we register a new domain specifically for the feature? The latter would allow us to do some linking back to the main website, and would probably be good in terms of future career flexibility / personal branding for whoever writes it. Things to keep in mind? Anyone have any suggestions? Best practices? What should I do?
Link Building | | monetize-2660060 -
Creating profiles just to get a link is black hat?
Hi, i have a competitor that is creating profiles in sites that passes ranks in links and putting some links with good anchor text in the bio field. This can be considered a black hat seo? This competitor is getting good rank up with these pratices and i dont know if i can use these same sites too. link to profile: http://interact.webstandards.org/member/89166/ There are a lot of more sites with profiles with no content and just a link to the site. Thanks in advance, Denis
Link Building | | de.tierno1