Link to webdesign bureau in footer on follow or nofollow
-
As we are growing fast, more and more websites go online. When they do, we always put a link in the footer which says: ‘Webdesign by Conversal’. But this is creating a substantial amount of backlinks to our root domain with the same anchors. Recently, we’ve moved our websites to different servers to spread the risk of a server crashing. I think Google now sees the backlinks through different IP’s as artificial, not natural, while Semrush and Moz are giving us a toxic score.
What is your advice on this? Will we need a ‘no-follow’ attribute to each link on every website? Or could we better write a small case article for each client, where we can link to in the footer?
-
Test it. No-follow a portion of the links (if you have designed hundreds of sites, maybe try 10%). See if your results go up, stay the same or go down. If your results go down, remove the no-follow tags again. Even if the results don't instantly come back (and Google keeps the no-follow reference, even when the coding is removed) you won't have lost much as you kept your sample small
SEMRush and Moz Toxicity ratings rely a little too much on linguistic, 'semantic' relevance (e.g: "a link from a car manufacturer to a car insurance site is relevant as they're both about cars"). Deeper relevance (that which Google is actually looking for) is more to do with "why is it relevant for the user to click on this link?"
Toxicity scores may simply be a reflection that you have loads of links from sites which are 'thematically' irrelevant. But that doesn't necessarily make the links themselves irrelevant! It may well be useful for people to Google the sites you made, think they are cool and wonder who designed them
The truth is neither SEMRush nor Moz knows exactly what Google thinks a good / bad link is. They basically look for patterns in backlink profiles and linking sites, which have been involved in penalties which did occur on Google (which they know from their keyword / ranking indexation data). If suddenly 2-3 sites drop out of the rankings and they all shared similar backlinks, SEMRush and Moz can estimate that those linking sites (under certain circumstances) may be bad
But it's not a 100% guarantee, indeed if you disavow or no-follow loads of links based on these ratings alone - you often do see little performance dips (without doing more forensic, more holistic research)
If your main concern is that 'site-wide linking' may be negatively affecting you, there could be a simple cure for that. Your idea of producing case studies on your own site is great, but it stops you getting free traffic and leads from sites that you designed - if those sites stop helping you rank well, or stop linking to you
Instead you could create new pages on the clients sites. Yeah seems crazy but hear me out as I have some logic behind this which might create a good compromise, which would be very interesting to test
In the footer on your client's sites, leave a link saying "Webdesign by Conversal". When users click that link, instead of taking them directly to your own site, you could point that link to a page on the client's site with some design sketches, a bit of blurb about how your approached the project. THAT page (on your client's site) could then link to you directly. In this way, you'd only get ONE link from each site, but the footer link would remain (though it would become an internal link) and continue to serve you. Maybe this could be a decent solution, but I've never tested it (sorry)
The links from these pages on your client's sites (accessible only from the footer links) could connect with the case study URLs on your own site, creating a unified experience which leads people down a funnel - to buying a site design from you
I might try that on a few sample clients, monitor the results. If the results didn't drop I'd at least feel better insulated against Penguin, and would probably then roll out another batch
-
Hi
Firstly because footers can be easily used for backlinks and not usually relevant - am of the view that google gives a low weighting to backlinks from footer links.
Secondly, the right use of footer in your context is just brand. ie so Conversal.
The overuse and what could appear as spammy use of the same anchor text will likely be dealt with by google as a penalty perhaps for the customer query only. However that said - if you are ranking well, top 3 for the term webdesign in your country then it may be working. That said going forward would move back to brand for further footer links. It would only be a timing issue until you got a penalty.
On toxicity of links generally - suggest a link audit and see what you find.
Hope that helps.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Importance of external links in 2018
How important are external links in 2018. How much of a percentage do they represent when deciding to rank a page. I imagine it depends on the query but I was wondering it if 10 % of of 60 % ? My feeling is that with good content you can get on almost any query on the 1 st page without links because that would be too penalising to small business if they had no possibility to rank with just content. Looking forward to getting some feedback.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | seoanalytics2 -
More bad links
Hi, After a recent disastrous dalliance with a rogue SEO company I disavowed quite a few domains (links he had gained) which I was receiving a penalty of about 23 places. I cleaned up the site and added meta descriptions where missing, and deleted duplicate titles and pages. This gained me another 5 places. In the meantime I have been getting a few links from wedding blogs, adobe forums and other relevant sites so was expecting an upward momentum. Since the high point of bottom of page 1 I have slowly slid back down to near the bottom of page two for my main keywords. Just checked my webmaster tools latest links and another 4 domains have appeared (gained by the dodgy SEO) : domain:erwinskee.blog.co.uk domain:grencholerz.blog.co.uk domain:valeriiees.blog.co.uk domain:gb.bizin.eu They all look bad so I am going to disavow. I expect to find an improvement when I disavow these new domains. As I have said, have started using the open site explorer tool to check my competitors backlinks and getting some low level links(I'm a wedding photographer) like forum comments and blog comments and good directories. I know there is much more than this to SEO and plan on raising my game as time progresses. I have also gained more links from the domains I disavowed on the 8th January mostly from www.friendfeed.com. will webmaster tools ignore any new links from previously disavowed domains? Like I have said I know there are better ways to get links, but are these links (forum comments, blog comments and respectable directories) one way of raising my rankings? To be honest that is all my competitors have got other than some of the top boys might have a photograph or two on another site with a link. No-one has a decent article or review anywhere (which is my next stage of getting links). Thanks! David.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | WallerD0 -
How to detect a bad link and remove ?
As per google penguin, all the low quality back links are going to affect the website SERPS hugely. So, we need to find all the bad back links and then remove them one by one. What I would like to know is, what tool do you use to find all the bad back links ? And how do we know which is a bad back link or bad website, where our link should not be there ? Then what service what do you suggest for back links removal. I contacted LinkDelete.com and they quoted me 97$ for a month to remove all links in less than 3 weeks.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | monali123
Let me know, what you suggest.0 -
Fastest Way To Remove Footer Link? (post-Panda)
Hello, I have a website with 1k+ links pointed directly to an inner page and home page from blogspot domains. There are 3 links in the footer that points to different locations. 1st anchor text points to the person who designed the page template and links to their website (this doesn't affect us) 2nd anchor text uses a direct keyword that I am trying to rank for and links to the inner page. 3rd anchor text uses my website name and links to the home page I know that these are not good links and the content inside the pages are irrelevant to my own website. The links are embedded into the template on the footer and is site wide.I have already contacted the designer and have the links removed but those that have downloaded the templates still have the footer link. What would be the best way to remove all these footer links? Trying to contact each individual person who is using the template is not working out as most have not responded and some of the websites have not seen an update in years! Any thoughts? If you need additional information feel free to send me a direct message so I can send you an exact link.
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Shawn1240 -
Outbound link to PDF vs outbound link to page
If you're trying to create a site which is an information hub, obviously linking out to authoritative sites is a good idea. However, does linking to a PDF have the same effect? e.g Linking to Google's SEO starter guide PDF, as opposed to linking to a google article on SEO. Thanks!
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | underscorelive0 -
Noindex, Nofollow to previous domain
Hi, My programmer recently did a horrible mistkae by adding noindex, nofollow to our website without me noticing for two days. At the same time he did it we bought a new domain and redirected the old domain to the new domain: The Old domain is: http://www.websitebuildersworld.com and the new one is: http://www.websiteplanet.com Now unfortunatly I didn't notice the noindex,nofollow when it was on the old domain and I redirected it to websiteplanet.com before I fixed the noindex, nofollow. I fixed the problem around 10 hours ago on the new domain (www.websiteplanet.com) but the old domain didn't get indexed back (yet), so for example if you search for WebsiteBuildersWorld in google you will not reach the homepage as google deleted it because of the noindex,nofollow. My question is:
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | Ouzan
Do you think that it will be fixed and google will retrieve websitebuildersworld homepage to his search results and then redirect it to websiteplanet? Or because I redirected websitebuildersworld.com to websiteplanet.com before letting google crawling websitebuildersworld.com without the noindex,no follow it wouldn't get indexed again? I hope I explained the problem good enough. Looking forward for your valuable replies. Thanks.0 -
Any good link buying companies ( http://www.text-link-ads.com )
Hi guys I have been passed this website: http://www.text-link-ads.com Has anyone ever used text-links ads before?? Can anyone please show me the way and suggest any really good lin buying companies? I am really fiding it hard to find good places to place inbound links into our website.. Thanks Gareth
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | GAZ090 -
Links to Facebook pages
I would like to ask if anyone has any knowledge regarding linking to a company's facebook page. I have built a few links to a client's facebook page in an effort to have it rank better in SERPs. I just learned that unlike twitter and linkedin, it is apparently not possibly to directly link to facebook pages. At least it is not possible from a search engine's perspective. If you follow any facebook page link while you are not logged into facebook, you are redirected to the facebook home page. I can't think of any way around this obstacle. I'd love some clever solution such as providing a URL which includes a basic dummy facebook login but there is nothing I am aware of to achieve this result. Does anyone have any ideas on this topic?
Intermediate & Advanced SEO | | RyanKent0