Portfolio website: reciprocal backlinks and redirects

[fdepino]

My company specializes in website design and development, and as such, the portfolio section on our website has lots of links to websites we've built. Generally, the way that we do this is that our portfolio sections links to URLs with a naming scheme as follows:

http://ourcompany.com/client1

which is either

• a redirect to http://client1.com if the site is still up, or
• a version hosted on our website (http://ourcompany.com/client1) if the client is no longer hosting their site.

In addition, most of our client sites contain a reciprocal link back to ourcompany.com, usually with the text "Website design and development by OurCompany".

I have two questions about this arrangement:

1. Might the reciprocal backlinks from the client sites be affecting the SEO results for ourcompany.com? I know that reciprocal backlinks can be occasionally problematic.
2. If I do a search for "site:ourcompany.com", I'll get results for all of the client sites that we're hosting at http://ourcompany.com/client1, because I haven't excluded them in robots.txt. Of course, the content of these sites has little to do with that of our company, because we have a diverse array of clients and none of them do web design and development (which is the content focus of our site). Might this seemingly unrelated content be affecting our results? Should the client sites be excluded in robots.txt or via nofollow?

Thanks very much!

[AlanMosley]

i would not worry about the reciprocal links, this is natrual and not a worry.

but i would be concerned about them being under your domain as it may confuse the meain of your site, if you no index them, you will be giving link juice away still, but wont be getting any back. I would use a meta tag noindex,folow

this way they will not index the clinet sites, but will return the link juice

[fdepino]

Thanks for the reply, Alan.

Are you suggesting the meta tag "noindex, follow" on the pages like http://ourcompany.com/client1? If so, what's the difference between doing that and excluding /client1/* in robots.txt?

Also, can you elaborate on what you mean by "return the link juice"?

Thanks a lot!

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Frank,

First, let me answer your question to Alan.

The main advantage of NOINDEX, FOLLOW is that robots can still crawl these pages and pass any link juice that flows through them. So any links pointing to these pages, whether from your own site or external sources, can return back to your site through the links on these pages. Make sense?

If the search engines are excluded from crawling, then they can't discover any links on these pages that flows back to your site.

Also, it seems that you would want to keep these pages out of Google's index, as they are completely unrelated to your site (unless you wrapped them in branding and re-purposed the content as a sort of portfolio)

Sometimes you can get an over-optimization penalty for too many exact match anchor text links pointing back to your site, so watch the anchor text on the reciprocal links and try to vary them as much as possible.