Are sidewide badge links can harm your website?

[stevanl]

Hey all,

I wanted to check if links that have built naturally over the past years, linking from a badge (image) sitewide, can harm the linked website?

Here is some more information:

1. It's from a competition that the winners were able to add the badge with the link to their site (the link to our website was to a subpage, not homepage).

2. There are around 15 websites with the badge as a link. The website has around 200 root domain links. There will not be any more websites with the badge, just these 15.

3. The sitewide links percentage are 5% of the overall number of pages linked to our website.

Based on the last penguin update (4th of October, 2013), can our website be harmed from the badge link building?

[GlobeRunner]

Based on the last several Google Penguin updates, if your site was going to be harmed or your rankings were going to go down, they probably would have gone down already. That said, that doesn't mean that you could still be penalized.

If there are sitewide badge links, they need to look natural. I wouldn't use any specific keyword anchor text, I would use your website name or brand or URL as the anchor text in the link. Don't make it look like you're trying to "game" Google by having too much exact match anchor text.

If these links are only a small percentage of the overall links that you have pointing to your site, then there won't be a problem. But if you have only 5 percent like you're saying then it should be fine.