Footer anchors question

[BTMSEO]

A few months ago, we changed the anchors in all of our websites footers to rel="nofollow". We did this so we could drop the possibility of getting hit by the penguin update. So first, we had anchors in the template of every website that read something along the lines of "web design by bluetone media". This was on every page, so we quickly changed every link in our footers to nofollows so it would show Google that we were using that space for mainly branding purposes, instead of stealing juice from clients. However, after monitoring our link analysis, we have severely dropped in domain authority, domain moztrust, domain mozrank and more. I believe this is due to the lack of followed links, so would it be best to go back and remove all of the links from the templates of our websites and just leave the dofollow links on the homepages of our websites, or just wait it out and see what happens. This crazy decline in domain authority has only recently happened, should I expect a bounce back soon?

[julianhearn]

Has your rankings dropped as well?

And when you say "so would it be best to go back and remove all of the links from the templates of our websites and just leave the dofollow links on the homepages of our websites" do you mean leave a link to bluetone media on just the homepage of your client sites and not other sites you own?

[BeardoCo]

I would keep them as do follow and just brand with your company name.  Don't use any keywords such as web design.  You will not be penalized for a branding anchor text of your company name, unless your company names is 'shoes' and at that point why would you need to do any seo work

[BTMSEO]

Our rankings are starting to take a slight dip and yes, I was thinking about removing all of the links, except the homepage links and I would turn those homepage links back into dofollow links that point to our site.

Thanks for the quick responses!

[julianhearn]

The way I see it that a link on the footer of a client site is like you said "stealing juice from clients". It not a true citation like google really wants to see.

Read this: http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2259674/Penguin-2.0-Forewarning-The-Google-Perspective-on-Links

Your clients are not currently recommending you, you are recommending yourself by putting a link in their footer. Sure you will get link juice but you also might get penalty. I would instead remove the links from the footer (not a great place for links) and instead ask them to write an honest review of you in their plan, or on a supplier page, their about us page, or some other suitable page.

[Dr-Pete]

Keep in mind that our metrics (including MozRank, DA, and PA) don't measure the risk of Google devaluing or penalizing your link profile. By no-following these links, your raw inbound link equity will go down, and it will impact our metrics if those links made up a large portion of your profile.

On the other hand, that doesn't mean that it's the wrong thing to do. Taken to extreme, these kinds of footer links are getting increasingly risky. Unfortunately, mitigating that risk does mean losing any positive impact of those links. It's not an easy decision, and it may be painful in the short-term, but you're betting that short-term pain against the risk of long-term catastrophe.

Whether that's the right decision for your site today is a tough call (and certainly one we can't make without details), and I'm assuming you had good reason to make it. I wouldn't worry too much about our metrics, and I'd focus instead on the impact on your actual rankings and traffic (especially traffic that converts). Don't reverse the decision too lightly, because switching back and forth can also send negative signals to Google.