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Hi Anirban,

As far as I know they don’t crawl websites that way. Did you check the following?

• Make sure there are no internal links (you already said so, but double check this since one link can get a whole lot of pages indexed).
• These pages don’t have external links pointing to them
• These pages aren’t in the sitemap

If you wish to keep pages out of the index you can try the following:

• Add the noindex tag
• Exclude them through your robot.txt file

I hope this helps.

Hi Mike,

Your solution is pretty common and effective. Like James said, this doesn’t transfer all the linkjuice (wide spread misconception). In the original pagerank system there was a damping factor of 0.85. So through every link or redirect 15% pagerank was lost. Although it’s unknown if these rates stayed the same during the years you can expect a small lose in linkjuice.

This is why people do outreach to change their backlinks after a sitemigration. In most cases I recommend to only try to change your most important backlinks since it’s probably not worth your time chasing down every link you got.

Hope you this helps you plan your next steps.

Hi Christian,

Were do you find the [No Title]? Any screenshot would help. As far as I can see the 200 pages got a title and description. Although these are definitely worth looking at since a lot of them are far too long.

The massive amount of 404’s got me worry the most. Beside that might be worth your time to check the HTTPS vs HTTP version since these seems to create a duplicated version of the site.

Hope this helps.

Hi Marie,

Your quick answer made me wonder, do you monitor this subject somehow? Or were you just lucky to see it pass by in the Q&A?

Haha, the other guys already told you, but this is great! Thank you very much for all the research you did about this topic.

Hi Andy,

I do agree about your advice to clients. The reason I bring this up is because it's totally normal in this industry (putting a stamp on your work) and for that reason I would find it logic if search engines treat these different than other side wide links.

NoFollow is very rare and only makes up a very small % of all the links on the web (a lot of web developers don’t even know what it does) so I would find it strange if those “follow” links bring down penalties.

From a search engine view, wouldn’t this be a great way to determine what web development firm made what kind of websites? If I build a great websites for a large corporation, why shouldn’t that be a quality signal? Reviews are?

Did you see any concrete penalties that a web development did get because of these links?

Hi Patrick,

Great addition! Didn't think about the potential risk of spammy backlinks the client might get.

I will definitly take that in consideration. Did you see any penalties from this kind of links with clients?

Thanks for both of your opinions! Would love to hear some more about this topic.

@Patrick – Isn’t nofollow a bit of being overly protected? No offence, I’m  considering it as well but since every web development company does the follow link, won’t Google just devaluate the links till let’s say 5-10% of a normal link? I don’t see any of my competitors getting penalized while there backlink profile consist of 80% “designed by” links, some of them with keyword anchor text in them as well. I’m sure your way is the most safe, but missing a change can hurt as well.

@Andy – Do you mean they hold 0% link value or just very low link value? Since with 300 clients this can be an enormous amount of backlinks and then no value vs small value makes a lot of difference. I agree with you that this isn’t the only way you should be linkbuilding, we are definitely going to do a lot of other stuff it’s just that I want this to be further proof since it will make up a big part of our backlink profile (same as with every web development company).

Hi Guys,

Since our company does a lot of web development jobs next to our SEO work, we came across the topic of the “Design by” or “Webdesign by” links that our competitors are placing in the footer of clients websites. When I did some backlink analysis of our competitors these links make up the biggest part of their backlink profile. That way, I think they are important for the promotion and SEO of web development companies.

I would love to have your opinion about how to use these links for SEO

1. Side wide vs homepage

I think there are two ways here, going for a link at the bottom of every page or just one link at the bottom of the homepage. When you look at exposure the most ideal situation would be a side wide link (more eyeballs). From a SEO standpoint this might cause trouble.

2. Follow vs nofollow

I think this is a very interesting one since there seems to be a lot of different opinions about if this is advertisement or not. A normal banner in a sidebar would get the nofollow tag to match Google’s guidelines but what about this “designed by” link? I know  few designers and “putting a stamp” on their work is pretty common and more likely viewed as something that they deserve then an act of commerce.

Besides this discussion adding the nofollow tag could prevent any issues with side wide links but reduces any SEO benefits to zero. Another option is adding the nofollow tag to all the links expect the one on the homepage.

3. Anchor text and descriptive text

Since anchor texts play a big role in SEO (and in detecting spam) I’m interested in your opinion about the use of anchor texts with such links. Just the company name or the web address sounds like a safe choice (especially with side wide links) but it’s pretty attempting to link words like “Webdesign” instead of the company name. Do you think it’s safe to use this, or any other keywords in 0,5,10,15,20,25% of the times?

And do you think the descriptive text “Webdesign and SEO by” got any value (or causes potential risks) when added before the link?

4. Alternatives or extra link opportunities

Here are some other options I found and thought about considering getting links from client websites.

• Asking, or earning a link in their first blogpost. Yjpiieee our website is online, thanks guys of company X.
• Links in the disclaimer or legal parts of the website.
• Link in the main content of the about us. Most likely in the bottom a little section about the credits of the design etc.
• Links on partner / friend / links pages of the website.

I saw all of these links in the backlink profiles of our competitors.

Last but not least, my current standpoint:

At this moment we ask our clients if we may place a small text and link in the footer of their website next to the copyright claim. We use texts like “Webdesign and SEO by Web Whales”. With only our brand name as anchor text (to avoid penalties). It’s a side wide follow link. Side wide because we want the exposure and follow because we want the SEO benefit. We considered just making the homepage link follow, but this kind of feels like manipulation so we just went for all follow since this is pretty normal on the web.

Beside that we celebrate new websites with our clients to increase the change getting mentioned on the first blog or partner page. Occasionally we ask them for links on these pages.

What’s your opinion about this topic?

Hi Om,

I recommend making your sitemap update daily (automatically). If you're using WordPress the SEO by Yoast plugin can do this for you. If you submit the URL to Google everything will go automatically. Manually changing is a real pain in the *** since every time a page disappears you should update your sitemap since this could cause you sending Google to 404 pages.

Can it be that the traffic from Google are expats? Since it's hard to give people a face solely based on Google Analytics data. Either way you look at it, I think the best solution is the one that services your visitors and is SEO friendly. And if you’re facing the situation you can’t choose between the two, I would always stick with designing for people instead of search engines.

Since search engines are getting pretty smart in detecting unnatural “optimalisation” and a good user experience results indirect in good rankings (dwell time for example) as well.

Thank you both! This really helps.

Hi Lina,

It would keep the URL's short and descriptive for your visitors and more important in the SERP's which could increase your CTR.

Besides that, my experience is that people look for either an hotel or information about the place. Although they will find the information useful at some point the starting of a search (entering the query in Google) will focus on either information about the place or information about the hotels.

This way I would split the information on your website as well and make sure you point your visitors to it with internal links or buttons.

That’s just my point of view, asking your target audience about this is a great way to make decisions as well!

• Hi Lina,

  Can't you just make a page for city guides and one for hotels and use those as head pages and put the rest under those?

  So

  head page: hotels

  under that: battambang and under that one the classy hotels page

  And for the guide something like:

  head page: expat city's

  under that: battanbang guide

  Just an idea, good luck with redirecting!

Hi Lina500,

I think you’re right about changing this before moving on. In any website we develop website structure comes before content creation.

I understand your concern about keywords in the URL and the length of the URL. The current URL is pretty confusing for your visitors and is probably too long to read.

Gladly for you, Google doesn’t put too much weight on keywords in your URL and they are getting better and better at understanding what pages are about. A Word like accommodations will be known as a close variant of hotels for example. This way a descriptive URL is just fine.

In your situation I would find out what words are used most. For example:

Accommodations vs hotels

Island guides vs city guides

If the most searched keyword describes the page I would pick that one. If however the other keyword fits the content of that page best I would pick the other keyword.

Your own suggestion movetocambodia.com/expat-city-guides/battambang/accommodation/classy-hotel/ seems like a pretty good one to me.

I would only skip /expat-city-guides/ and make it movetocambodia.com/battambang/accommodation/classy-hotel/ since these are keywords that get used combined. People won’t search for city guide classy hotel for example.

In the ideal situation I would go for /expat city guides/battambang/ for the city guides and put your accommodation overview under  /accommodations/battambang/classy-hotel/ (without /expat-city-guides/ before it.).

I hope this helps!

Hi Omverma,

I totally agree with Hectormainar, sitemaps aren’t a must but I would definitely recommend them! Any website with a few levels (webshops for example) will have large amounts of deeper pages that are hard to get by through the internal link structure and a sitemap definitely helps with that.

Besides that, if you upload your sitemap in Google webmaster Tools you can get a quick view of how many pages Google has indexed. For me this is a quick indication of any indexation problems might going on.

I hope this helps!

Hi Dave,

Moz is actually pretty right about this. Those are duplicated versions of the same page and should have a canonical tag (or shouldn’t be generated in the first place).

You can find some more information about canonical tags here:

https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/139066?hl=en

In your case I would check why these different URL’s are generated as well and make sure your internal links all point to one version. Screaming frog can help you map all your internal links and find any links to the duplicated versions of the pages.

I hope this helps!

Hi Patrick,

Thanks for your response!

I did read the resources on Moz and couldn’t find an answer to this particular question. Ignore the low quality sites and focus on the top 50 comes the closest to what I’m looking for.

Any thoughts about how Google handles citations of a Dutch business on big international business directories?

Hi all,

I normally work for clients in my home county (The Netherlands) and with local citation building I focus on Dutch websites or well know .com websites in the Netherlands. My rule of thumb kinda was, if it’s not known in the Netherlands it isn’t worth getting mentioned there.

Since The Netherlands are pretty small and I think Google ain’t perfect I was wondering if it makes sense to list a Dutch business on any .com business listings that are internationally big, but aren’t well known in the Netherlands.

Two reasons that got me thinking this direction:

1. A big well known Dutch company offers a service such as Moz local and did integrate their service with several international business listing websites that I never heard off, since these business directories focus themselves on other parts of the world.
2. Google ain’t perfect and I think they got more budget to identify trustworthy business directories with an international focus or a focus on America then with a focus on The Netherlands.

So I’m wondering if it makes any sense to list a Dutch business on let’s say the top 20 international business directories (although these directories don’t have any brand recognition in The Netherlands).