Are hosting Web badges still worth it?

[xtrill]

Hi,

I would like to ask you about a really specific case: hosting company web badges.

I'm working for a web hosting company, and in order to increase the number of incoming links we were considering providing web badges to our customers, so they could link back to us.

Some customers would be glad to show they host their website with us placing one web badge in their website, but after the last penguin update I'm not sure if it's still a good idea.

As the company is hosting several thousand websites it could be a really good opportunity to get some back links, but I would like to hear your suggestions.

• Shall we use "nofollow" on the links? (But that way we would be missing all the link juice that we could get)

• Would it be better to just show the web badge on the home page of each domain and keep the dofollow attribute?

• Are there some terms that we should use or avoid in the links? Maybe "Hosted at <company name="">" would be a good anchor text, or shall we just use the company name? </company>

So, I would love to hear your advice about doing or not doing it. Or any advice about how to do it properly in order to get the desired result.

Thanks!

Xavier.

[CaseyKluver]

Xavier,

I think generally right now they still work to a point, the problem you will likely run into in the future is the mass amount of links with the same anchor text pointing back to the same page on your site.

One way to work around this problem could be to randomly generate anchor text and URL for each site that uses the badge.

[irvingw]

yes if you have specific pages with different names you could serve that up as the anchor text. unless you can do that it's not worth your time because that anchor phrase will just get penalized and you won't rank for it