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I imagine that eventually he will be caught, right? He might get whacked - especially if the sites have verbatim text on every page.  He might get away with it for a long long time if each site has totally unique text and he isn't interlinking these sites very heavily or interlinking them with nofollow.  Lots of people are able to link between their own properties if they are using the biz name as the anchor text instead of a money keyword.  (I know that this answer wasn't satisfying, but that's my opinion on how diverse are the ways that Google handles these things. I mean, this has to be Black Hat SEO. Ignorant bliss has a large overlap with black hat in appearance, although the intent is very different.  It's blackhat if these sites are identical except for the name of the community and the seller of the service knows that this is far below best practice.... and even worse if they are being juiced from a private blog network or paid links from ignorant webmasters or from those who know paid links are not good but sell anyway. Have any of you encountered an SEO/Marketer like this? This stuff is everywhere. Sometimes they grab your content and use it in New Jersey. If so, what do you do about it? Beat their asses with quality.

Yup, the requirement for these kinds of links is to use nofollow on them, Roger. They're worth leaving in place (assuming you have the clients' permission) for their potential referral value, but even without the nofollow, they'd have little SEO value anyway as Google heavily devalues sitewide footer links like that. Best to be safe from having them considered manipulative by making them nofollow. If you want to add another layer of usefulness, add UTM tracking to the links so you can easily distinguish visitors from those links in your Analytics. That way you can assess how those visitors are performing once they reach your site. I'd actually recommend going one step further and creating a custom landing page that is specifically optimised for visitors you know have already seen a website you designed. Make sense? Paul

I've had this same question, thanks for the answers all!