Backlink Badges - Good or Bad

[virtualmechanics]

One of my free tools for creating web pages automatically inserts a back-link to my home page as a footer, or 'badge' from the free web pages it creates. Hence there are tens of thousands of low quality sites out there linking back to my home page. While this was great ten years ago, Google looks on things differently these days. So the question is, will Google penalize me for this? Does the negative outweigh the positive - should I remove the insertion of back-link badges from the product?

Thanks,

Peter

[Tim_Jacquet]

I really can't wait to hear people opinions on this. If it works without a penalty, I will try it.

[FedeEinhorn]

Hi Peter,

It is widely known now that any kind of compensation given for a link is against Google TOS (that includes affiliate links, "powered by" links, PRs, sponsored posts, etc). All of them should be not followed, in that way, you still get the people that may want the services you offer without affecting Google rankings.

There are some rel alternatives that could help Google recognize those links and not count them towards your rankings (or counting them differently). Take the case of Wordpress, most of their hosted blogs have a "powered by" link, but they use rel="generator" which helps Google distinguish between spam and "powered by" links.

Anyway, there are 2 sides of the coin here. Google said that affiliate links should be nofollow, but I still see sites that have hundreds of thousands of links (over 95% of their link profile) from affiliates, which are followed and not blocked by anything and the site ranks 1st.

I would recommend to nofollow those links, but that is my approach. I even created a javascript method to insert our affiliate links (including the nofollow tag), still, we are ranked 10th on the same query that the site I mentioned above ranks 1st.

Hope this answer helps you at least decide what is your approach and what to do...

[nurzhyk]

First what you need to control is anchor texts. If the tool you use uses one commercial keyword as anchor text for all sites it is a big problem for your link profile potentially.  For a start check your backlink profile and see the anchors (use MajesticSEO or Ahrefs for this). For natural profile most used anchors will be brand names, url as anchor or domain name as anchor.

[virtualmechanics]

Thanks for the helpful responses!

Peter

[Carson-Ward]

This is what I'd do:

• Use the brand name in the anchor text
• Allow people to remove them (or, to be extra safe, turn it off by default and prompt people to turn it on)
• Keep the links followed.

You could definitely debate the last point, but as long as you're not paying people for the link itself or trying to manipulate Google's algorithm it shouldn't be a big deal. If you're extremely risk averse, go ahead and add nofollow to the links.