Need Expert Footer Link Advice

[CsmBill]

We have a sister company that provides online administrative services to .EDUs. The administrative site has thousands of pages, with good pagerank, excellent trust, and a clean bill of health from Google, as does our corporate site. We have the ability to put footer links on every page back to our corporate website. Options:

1. Do nothing for fear of getting penalized by Google

2. Footer Link: Web Design by Logo, with "Web Design" being the anchor text.

3. Footer Link: Web Design by XYZ with "Web Design" and "XYZ" being the anchor text for link diversity.

4. Footer Link: Web Design by Logo with "Web Design" and the Logo (Alt Text "XYZ Corp") being anchors for link diversity.

5. Put up a page (or 2) about web design on the administrative site, have all of the footers link to that page, and have that page link back to our corporate site.

We really aren't doing anything wrong here, but both sites have a clean bill of health and the Google spam police have me paranoid. Our corporate site has an excellent link profile with hundreds of links from .gov, .us, and .edu. The links have commercial value, and can drive traffic to our site.

Looking for your thoughts before we make a move.

[DavidKonigsberg]

I would play it safe and do

Footer Link: Web Design by XYZ.com with "XYZ.com" being the anchor text

[CsmBill]

Thanks for your response!

Can you tell me why?

[DavidKonigsberg]

To make my self clear "xyz.com " is your domain name

Site Wide non relevant Footer links have a bad rap so any anchor text keyword used bedsides your domain name may one day get penalized . You still gain by having the link and the text near it does use keywords so not a total loss.

But then again this is just a safe approach......