Other sites linking to our site through sitewide footers

[marynau]

Hello,

We have other sites linking to our site through images in sitewide footers, resulting in a link from every page of each site. Those sites are not owned by us and they decided to link to us on their own. They usually link to us as their "sponsor" or "partner", sponsor as in sponsor of some event and partner as in we sometimes work together on joint initiatives.

I've searched Moz forum and other articles, but haven't been able to find an answer to this question. We'd like to make sure Google doesn't consider it to be spammy and we don't get any sort of penalty. Should we ask them not to link to us through those images in a sitewide footer or ask them to simply add "nofollow"? We don't want to remove those links if they are not considered to be harmful and removing them will hurt our DA/PA.

[Nigel_Carr]

Hi Marynau

It's considered bad practice to link to other sites through footers. It results in 100s and often 1000s of links coming to you from one site which could be considered spammy. You probably won't get a manual penalty but there may be an algorithmic one if it happens too frequently from a number of different sites.

Check the spam score of the site linking to you - use the MOZ bar - if they are a sponsor then they are likely to be OK. Then politely ask them to link to you once from an 'Our Sponsors' page or just one link from the home page (as it's likely to have a higher PA - page authority)

I hope that helps,

Regards

Nigel