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
-
Automatic links from other domains when we create a new landing page - Is this a spammy technique?
Hi everyone, Recently we've discovered 2-3 sites (which we own the domains names) and these sites seem to automatically create links to our new landing pages on our main site. Those sites also can't be accessed in your browser as it redirects straight to our main website. So, for example, we create a new landing page on our main site, and then Moz has been picking up links to this page from these other domains with text such as "Book now". I think historically someone in the company set up loads of sites with redirects and there must be something automatically happening. Is this likely to be a spammy technique? Ie we seem to be getting "follow" links from other domains every time we create a new page." Also as this could be quite a negative thing we've discovered I can't really give our out business links, but really appreciate your tips and advice. I'm trying to work out what to do if this is a spammy technique and also affecting our trust scores etc and what we should do about it. Thanks for your help and input. 🙂Mike
Link Building | | Ski-Online-Marketing-Team0 -
Link Building/ Off page strategy. Do we have already have a 'hook' or should we create more specific content.
Hi Guys. As part of our link building campaign I've been creating a database of people who might link to our site. We're a diary company. So I’ve been focusing on people interested in stationary, paper, pens, etc who also blog. We have a unique product at TOAD diaries, it's essentially an online tool that allows you to design your own diary. You can choose size, colour, duration, etc and also personalise the cover. So the product (we think) is very compelling and interesting. First of it’s kind. Check it out here: http://www.toaddiaries.co.uk/designer/diary/a5/everyday-diary-week-across-2-pages/coil-bound/toad-plum/12/1/8/2014 So.... question. Do you think that the site itself would considered 'good content'? i.e) It's already a very interesting idea that's worth linking to. Or Would it be better to create a high quality engaging blog (with info-graphics etc) that really speaks to that community of people? Say, about our love of the humble paper diary, and why it's still useful. Then use that blog content to try get links? You thoughts would be really appreciated. Thanks in advance. Isaac.
Link Building | | isaac6630 -
Web Designers and SEOs using backlinks from client sites
What are your thoughts on SEOs and web designers putting their own links in the footers of client sites. For the sake of argument, lets assume that the client is happy for the link to be there. I'm referring to the SEO merits of the link being there from an 'irrelevant' website. My belief is that this goes against what Google is looking for and that these are irrelevant links and likely to be picked up and penalised. That's what I believe! However, I see lots of sites offering SEO services that have dofollow links from their client sites, using exact match anchor text and they are all ranking highly. Is it just a matter of time before Google sniffs them out and penalises them for it? Or should I be going through my client sites and adding myself a dofollow link in the footer? (with their permission of course). The highest ranking sites in any UK city do this. If you search SEO Manchester, SEO Leeds etc and find the top ranking sites and check them out on opensite explorer, they are all using a disproportionate amount of dofollow backlinks form client sites.
Link Building | | littlesthobo0 -
I have created 5 model specific blog sites which deliver links to my core site.
I post about 500 words of unique relevant content weekly to each model blog site. Each week, seo smartlinks delivers keyword anchor text links to my core site with a 3% keyword density. I have been doing this for 3 months and my core site traffic is stagnant or slightly down. Is this a good practice since its relevant content, or am I writing for nothing? Also, am I in danger of over optimized anchor text?
Link Building | | SEOQuest720 -
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 -
Looking for good legal web directories
Hi, I am looking for some good legal web directories. I looked at the seomoz list but I didn't see any categorized as legal/law. Are there some good legal directories you can recommend? Any thoughts on Justia.com? Thanks, Scott
Link Building | | slangdon0 -
How to create a good pagination and titles for a forum
I have a subdomain forum in my website, for example: http://forum.mywebsite.com/, the point is that i'm not sure how to create the url pagination and title in the index of each category. Let's say that i have 10 categories, right, and i want to do the pagination for the index of each category. An example of a url for the category is: http://forum.mywebsite.com/category-one/, here i have the posts for this category i will present 10 for page, next when any user click to see the posts in the second page i have this url: http://forum.mywebsite.com/category-one/page1.html. Here is where i have the problem, the url for the pagination it is ok, but the problem will be the titles for the continues pages (page2.html, page3.html, etc), it can't be the same one of the first url. So what can i do to avoid the problem of same titles in differents urls or any solution whit out any trouble for the spider.
Link Building | | NorbertoMM0 -
What are the best paid web directories?
I'm not sure if it's worth the money, so first I don't want to try with Yahoo dir, but something a bit cheaper. I have a foreign site, but everything is translated ti english as well. I stucked at te second page for my keyword, so I tought I give this method a try. What do You think?
Link Building | | joo1