Should You Get Link back from Customers

[churchwebsites]

In the SEO guide on Moz, it states as one of the link building strategies:

Get your customers to link to you

If you have partners you work with regularly, or loyal customers that love your brand, you can capitalize on this by sending out partnership badges—graphic icons that link back to your site (like Google often does with their AdWords certification program). Just as you'd get customers wearing your t-shirts or sporting your bumper stickers, links are the best way to accomplish the same feat on the web.

We design websites for churches and non-profits, and put a link back to our site as the designer. We recently have been told this is spammy and not a good idea. However, from what MOZ says, it sounds like they are promoting you do this.

Please comment. Thanks.

[cklinkert]

I think this still looks like a spammy method

[churchwebsites]

Then just wondering why MOZ is suggesting it?

[cklinkert]

Is there any rule that if MOZ suggest, then it is true ?

[TheSymmetran]

There are two things two consider:

REAL WORLD:

If your work is flawless enough that in and of itself is a living breathing advertisement for you, by all means you may want to give yourself a no follow link, so visitors there see that you have made the masterpiece if they are interested any further in your work...

GOOGLE WORLD:

If you give yourself a link that is a regular FOLLOWEd link, then you are doing your site a disservice by making your anchor text profile more spammy. but i do not see how a no-follow link can hurt anything on this side.

risk is all yours.

[julie-getonthemap]

Do your own research to see if it works in your market.

When I reverse engineer the other local digital agencies in the SERPS, links from clients often seem to be their only link building strategy. We've all read that Google doesn't like it, or some people think it's spammy. I think that most of what we hear from Google and the many gurus is designed as advice for Fortune 500 companies.  If you're working with a dozen small customers, what works for Fortune 500 won't work for you, so don't accept their guidelines as gospel.

[churchwebsites]

Good points, Julie. Thanks to all of you who responded:-)

[BritneyMuller]

Thank you SO much for raising this question!

The Beginner's Guide To SEO is currently being updated and will address exactly this.

Google's John Mueller has stated in the past that it's ok to put a link on a client's site back to yours as long as it's rel="nofollow". When I was previously self-employed at Pryde Marketing, and heard Google state this, we instantly changed our client footer "Made by Pryde Marketing" links to rel="nofollow" and almost immediately saw organic improvements. I can't say for certain that changing our client > Pryde links to "nofollow" 100% caused this, but it didn't hurt.

My personal opinion is that you can benefit from clients linking back to your site in a credible way (ex. If you built their website) and have a rel="nofollow", you will be fine. If you reverse engineer any of the top web developer's sites, you'll likely see quite a few "built by xyz" linking back to their domains.