Backlinks in client website footers - best strategy?

[JeromeSavon]

I work for a web design & development agency. We are looking to rank for 'web design' and 'web development'. Typically we have a credit in the footer of every site we build (below). We have a lot of backlinks (>60,000) this way.

web design and development by

We link 'web design and development' and '<our name="">' separately.
Does this strategy sound ok and can anyone suggest improvements?</our>

Thanks

[JaredMumford]

Honestly, at first glance most SEO's would probably say this is a bad idea, particularly with Penguin - the problem is, it seems to work.  I know as an SEO when i do competitive analysis, some of our competitors have thousands of links that read:

SEO by

And they certainly rank for their respective terms. Opinions may differ with some SEO professionals here, but I would argue that unless you have seen a significant decline in positioning for the anchored text, I wouldn't be concerned about it and would venture to say that it's probably a positive strategy. The best part about links like these (we do this as well) is that for the most part, the links are usually very clean.

Hope that helps.

[JeromeSavon]

Thanks Jared. Though why would most SEOs say this is a bad idea?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Hi Matt,

I fall in the camp of SEOs that would avoid this strategy.

We've seen lots of cases of this backfiring, especially in the past year. For a specific example of site-wide footers devastating a business, see Ross Hudgen's piece on WPMU, and how they recovered....

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-penguin-update

Here's the problem. Google tends to devalue:

• Site-wide, boilerplate anchors
• Anchors in the footer
• Over-optimized anchors

Since Penguin, these three have been pounded especially hard.

I'd much rather have a single link from a single page - preferably in the body text - from each website built than a sitewide footer. I'd also vary the anchor text from link to link. This could be offered as an incentive, such as $100 off if the client includes a link (although this technically violates Google's guidelines on paid links. Gasp!)

If you do build footer links, I'd try NOT to build them to your homepage. If you ever incur a penalty and need to "cut" the links, it's very hard to return a 404 from your homepage.

Also, generic, branded or complete URLs are "safest" for sitewide links, because they aren't over-optimized.

Hope this helps! Best of luck with your SEO.

[JeromeSavon]

Thanks Cyrus. 
This makes sense, but my main issues are:

• All our high ranking competitors use this strategy. A lot.
• We've adjusted some of the inbound footer links to include service terms in the anchors and our rankings have noticeably improved.

So I think I will continue with this plan, but mixing up the anchor text.

BTW - I've read a few articles on 'over optimisation'  and there seems to be a mixed consensus on what it actually means. Are there any definitie article on this?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

Wish I could give you a definite answer, but because it's algorithmic, over-optimization is a shifting target.

"Over-optimization is the amount of optimization that makes your rankings go down."

[JaredMumford]

SEO's are wary and for good reason - it wasn't long ago that 'footer' links was an over-used tactic that was quashed, resulting in the start of the 'blogroll' type links. Like I said, opinions are going to differ wildly for different SEO's on this one. For us, when we work a client, we know and control their link profile so we know that their site(s) are very clean. As such, we feel that having a footer link to our business (just as web design companies do) that we are not at risk.

Like you, we see this everywhere in our competitor link profiles and in fact, we see large variations in local ranking when there are links added or removed from their or our local clients.

So it's going to be your call in the end - opinions will differ, and even I might change my mind within the next few months depending on what happens in the SE Algo world. But for now this is a practice we are actively using.

[Deacyde]

I'd like to revisit this issue.

Why? Recently a competitor who was brand spankin new, propped their site up with this tactic, they had their parent company place a backlink to their site in the footer, so they get 160 some backlinks.

I saw this as one of the most boneheaded moves since what I read constantly says don't do this, google will throat check you.

However they aren't being penalized like I thought and read. In fact, they've surpassed my client's site in rankings. It's a bit perplexing to experience really.

So even though others have said :

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.

What will happen to sites that link to other sites from their footer?

[Cyrus-Shepard]

My only response would be this. Sometimes it can work especially in the short run, but is often penalized. I would wait until the next penguin update comes out and take a look at the competitors site again. Again, not linking site wide from the footer is not a hard-and-fast rule but more of a general best practice.

The problem is that these are not editorial links per se. As such they are at constant risk are being devalued or penalized by Google.

You can roll the dice and sometimes see a short-term victory. But more often than not you risk getting burned.