Site Wide Links

[wearehappymedia]

Howdy Moz!

So our agency has been around for long enough to have a few sites we've built that have our credit in their footer resulting in a site wide link. Mostly just our name. We've heard that Google does not particularly like site wide links, should we go through and remove some of these old links?

[GastonRiera]

Hi Radi,

It's a common rule to switch the footer sitewide links to Nofollow. Google usually tends to consider those links as put on purpose to get SERPs benefit, so then you may get a penalty.
Another way to analyze this situation is that, when a sitewide link is on a web that have hundreads or thousand pages, you will be getting hundreads/thousands links with just the same anchor text: That is also a reason to be penalized.

Some more info in these answered questions:

Are sitewide links bad for SEO? - Moz Q&A
Sitewide links - Moz Q&A

Hope it's helpful.
GR.

[EGOL]

The Google Search Quality Guidelines has an article about "Link Schemes".

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en