How Can I Outlink Web Designer Link Building from Their Clients' Footer

[Michael4g]

_I used open site explorer to view the backlinks for a competitor of an agency I work with. They have ten times as many links, if not more, than we do, and I noticed there were only a few more domains linking back to them. As I dug deeper I noticed these links were coming from the footer tag they put on their clients' sites like "Site Designed by __." If a site had 20 pages, they had 20 links back...weird and annoying that it counts.

They have more clients for web design than we do, so their bulk linking could continue to outrank us. Any suggestions on how we can outrank them locally? We are in the midst of redesigning our entire site to build out more pages and have much better internal linking.

Any help would be greatly appreciated, thanks everyone!

[WhoWuddaThunk]

Matt Cutts has talked about the diminishing returns of multiple links from a single domain.  His video says that anything after 2 gets to be pretty minimal.

The other thing you need to consider is that site wide footer links aren't as strong as an in body link.  If you are doing your part to get legitimate in body links, through interviews or contributing to a blog in some way, then you are going to get farther than these site wides.

I ran into a similar problem with one of my sites.  I was up against a dozen web designers who have built hundreds of websites, but I was able to outrank them with just a handful of nofollow links.  They weren't great at on site SEO, which helped, but I knew that a lot of these links weren't worth much.

[Michael4g]

Thanks for the quick reply Who Wudda Thunk. You said you used just a handful of nofollow links, which sounds contradictory to me. Were these links in comment sections of high profile sites, forums, or simply in-body links from high ranking blogs/news sites?

Sorry I sound oblivious, but this is the first time I ran into an issue with the footer links. I usually go against other local small businesses that I can outrank.

[Nick_Ker]

It is very frustrating when you see something like that - things you know are "wrong" but a competitor gets away with it.

I am going to skip the whole preaching about "don't worry too much about competitors or what they do" thing, and point out that if you are going to count/compare links, it is best to look at number of linking domains rather than total links.

100 sitewide footer credit links from one site is not really the same as 100 links from 100 different sites.

[WhoWuddaThunk]

Nofollow links still pass some authority, but no where near an in body link.  I commented on blogs like Website Magazine, and a few other real high authority blogs.  I just used my actual name, and didn't try optimize the link.

Ranking for web design is definitely a little different because of inflated numbers.  You should also keep in my that link analysis tools, like Moz and Majestic, don't find every link on the internet, and can take a while to discover some links.  Always take these stats with a grain of salt, and focus on getting quality links.

If you are working local you can always try identify links pages in your area.  I was able to get one from a couple historical societies and a mall just by asking for it.  You can also have a link in your signature on forums, but try to limit these since too many would look spammy.