Site-wide links with optimized anchor words?

[Raymondlee]

Hi Moz community,

I work at a web design company. I found my competitors have a lot of site-wide backlinks from their clients with optimized anchor text "affordable web design by XXX". Some of the clients' website are not even relevant to web design or design industry. I am sure those are dofollow links. Although I heard a lot of sayings that site-wide backlinks look unnatural and spammy, why the top ranking guys are still using this way to acquire backlinks? Does Google really actually say no to this?

Thanks for any help and explanation.

Best,

Raymond

[SEO_GB]

Hi Raymond

Very nice question to ask i also see people in my industry using the same technique to aquire tons of backlinks, but as you consider about penguin 4.0 as it is now using the core alogorithm as a real time, one or another it will get penalized by google i think its not a long term strategy to sustain in market

Note: the key points in seo as we are a marketers is not to rank #1 in google . we need to just build the trust, great UI/UX interactions on our website