Link to webdesign bureau in footer on follow or nofollow

[conversal]

As we are growing fast, more and more websites go online. When they do, we always put a link in the footer which says: ‘Webdesign by Conversal’. But this is creating a substantial amount of backlinks to our root domain with the same anchors. Recently, we’ve moved our websites to different servers to spread the risk of a server crashing. I think Google now sees the backlinks through different IP’s as artificial, not natural, while Semrush and Moz are giving us a toxic score.

What is your advice on this? Will we need a ‘no-follow’ attribute to each link on every website? Or could we better write a small case article for each client, where we can link to in the footer?

[ClaytonJ]

Hi

Firstly because footers can be easily used for backlinks and not usually relevant - am of the view that google gives a low weighting to backlinks from footer links.

Secondly, the right use of footer in your context is just brand. ie so  Conversal.

The overuse and what could appear as spammy use of the same anchor text will likely be dealt with by google as a penalty perhaps for the customer query only.   However that said - if you are ranking well, top 3 for the term webdesign in your country then it may be working.  That said going forward would move back to brand for further footer links.  It would only be a timing issue until you got a penalty.

On toxicity of links generally - suggest a link audit and see what you find.

Hope that helps.

[effectdigital]

Test it. No-follow a portion of the links (if you have designed hundreds of sites, maybe try 10%). See if your results go up, stay the same or go down. If your results go down, remove the no-follow tags again. Even if the results don't instantly come back (and Google keeps the no-follow reference, even when the coding is removed) you won't have lost much as you kept your sample small

SEMRush and Moz Toxicity ratings rely a little too much on linguistic, 'semantic' relevance (e.g: "a link from a car manufacturer to a car insurance site is relevant as they're both about cars"). Deeper relevance (that which Google is actually looking for) is more to do with "why is it relevant for the user to click on this link?"

Toxicity scores may simply be a reflection that you have loads of links from sites which are 'thematically' irrelevant. But that doesn't necessarily make the links themselves irrelevant! It may well be useful for people to Google the sites you made, think they are cool and wonder who designed them

The truth is neither SEMRush nor Moz knows exactly what Google thinks a good / bad link is. They basically look for patterns in backlink profiles and linking sites, which have been involved in penalties which did occur on Google (which they know from their keyword / ranking indexation data). If suddenly 2-3 sites drop out of the rankings and they all shared similar backlinks, SEMRush and Moz can estimate that those linking sites (under certain circumstances) may be bad

But it's not a 100% guarantee, indeed if you disavow or no-follow loads of links based on these ratings alone - you often do see little performance dips (without doing more forensic, more holistic research)

If your main concern is that 'site-wide linking' may be negatively affecting you, there could be a simple cure for that. Your idea of producing case studies on your own site is great, but it stops you getting free traffic and leads from sites that you designed - if  those sites stop helping you rank well, or stop linking to you

Instead you could create new pages on the clients sites. Yeah seems crazy but hear me out as I have some logic behind this which might create a good compromise, which would be very interesting to test

In the footer on your client's sites, leave a link saying "Webdesign by Conversal". When users click that link, instead of taking them directly to your own site, you could point that link to a page on the client's site with some design sketches, a bit of blurb about how your approached the project. THAT page (on your client's site) could then link to you directly. In this way, you'd only get ONE link from each site, but the footer link would remain (though it would become an internal link) and continue to serve you. Maybe this could be a decent solution, but I've never tested it (sorry)

The links from these pages on your client's sites (accessible only from the footer links) could connect with the case study URLs on your own site, creating a unified experience which leads people down a funnel - to buying a site design from you

I might try that on a few sample clients, monitor the results. If the results didn't drop I'd at least feel better insulated against Penguin, and would probably then roll out another batch