Backlinks coming from websites we've built - Good or bad?

[nhhernandez]

Hi everyone,

I'm just doing a backlink audit of our newly relaunched site and saw that we have about 9,000 backlinks. Unfortunately, we have neglected our own link building. About 8,000+ of these links are from the websites we have built - sitewide footer links. These are also exact match anchor texts i.e. website by Bambrick Media. Because of that, our referring domain is only at 200+.

Is this bad practice? Should we keep these backlinks / keep doing this for future sites we build?

We feel like our backlink profile, the above in particular, is affecting our rankings and traffic. We're not ranking very well for our keywords. Compared to our competitors who have a quarter or less of the backlinks we have, they're ranking better, have more organic keywords, and are getting more organic traffic.

Thanks in advance.

[VesaNippala]

Hi,

This is a common issue and if you do a Google search about this issue, you will find a lot of discussion about this with many kind of opinions. Sitewide footer links are generally not a safe idea. Many people recommend making those links nofollow.

One solution could be to make the sitewide links nofollow, except the link in your customers frontpage footer. Then you'll get the link juice from the front page, but no penalty from sitewide links. Or what do other people think here, would that be a good approach?

[nhhernandez]

Thank you, I think that having only 1 backlink on the homepage footer is the best approach.