Can copyright links to your site have a negative impact on your SEO?

[Onlinq]

many of the websites we designed have a copyright link in the footer. Like:

webdesign by company name

then this is made a hyperlink to our company website.

Some of these websites have a high PR and other metrics but rarely are about webdesign.

What is a clever thing to do?

Tom

[William.Lau]

"nofollow" them. This done in a large scale can really affect your rankings. Search WPMU.org

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

[Onlinq]

Thanks William,

I was already considerating this. Which dofollows should I keep untouched?

The ones with a high Page authority or Domain Trust? What's a good metric, if any, to build this decision ?

[William.Lau]

I'd suggest keeping all of them as nofollow. Although they may benefit your rankings or your link profile, Google can easily consider it as spam and penalize you for that.

Refer to:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=mTjN9x-by-I

The best option if the site is a good site, is to just keep one link on one page. That is if you really must.

[KesilConsultingLLC]

Like William said, no follow is your best bet, especially on low quality sites that you might be associated with.

Another help can be making this branded anchor text, as in just <a href="">Company Name</a>.

In all reality footer links do next to nothing for SEO as they are considered low quality links on the site (being so far down on the website and often associated with other links such as a footer menu). They can easily appear spammy.

They do serve as another linking domain which is helpful, but the best way to attribute your work is to ask the site owner for a simple paragraph in the about us explaining the website, how it was built, and by whom. This provides a non spammy contextual backlink that is one click away from the homepage. This kind of link will provide much more SEO benefit than any footer backlink.

I will be transitioning a lot of my copyright style links to something such as this.

Hope this helps.

[irvingw]

disagree with above posts. get some page juice to your site!

a) dofollow them

b) use branded term only (not your keywords)

c) put on homepage footer only, not global. If the footer is global, simply create a homepage-footer.php file.