Best way to do site seals for clients to have on their sites

[ssltrustpaul]

I am about to help release a product which also gives people a site seal for them to place on their website.

Just like the geotrust, comodo, symantec, rapidssl and other web security providers do.
I have notices all these siteseals by these companies never have nofollow on their seals that link back to their websites.

So i am wondering what is the best way to do this. Should i have a nofollow on the site seal that links back to domain or is it safe to not have the nofollow.
It wont be doing any keyword stuffing or anything, it will probly just have our domain in the link and that is all.

The problem is too, we wont have any control of where customers place these site seals. From experience i would say they will mostly likely always be placed in the footer on every page of the clients website.

I would like to hear any and all thoughts on this. As i can't get a proper answer anywhere i have asked.

[Andy.Drinkwater]

Hi Paul,

For anything like this, I would always suggest that you nofollow the image links simple because they are not 'earned'.

I couldn't tell you what others are doing or if not nofollowing has had any impact, but from a safety point of view, nofollow is the way to go here.

Would google have a problem if not? Hard to say because they might recognise what is going on, but I tend to err on the side of caution here.

-Andy

[EGOL]

Google might consider this to be a "link scheme"....

One part of their definition of a link scheme is.... "Widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites..."     You can read their full document on link schemes here... https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/66356?hl=en

If the "seals" have a link in them with nofollow then they will not be considered to be manipulative.