I've built websites for various clients, and I like to place a link to my company website at the bottom of each project. In the post-penguin era, would it be best to rel="nofollow" these links or remove altogether? Or does somebody have a convincing conclusion that these links do no harm?
I think if the links are relevant, it's probably ok to leave them as do follow. It may depend somewhat though on the future success of the website owners and the sites that you built for them.
Of course you don't have to make the link nofollow. It's a good strategy to get backlinks. But don't include any other unrelated links. That would be harmful. Some wordpress theme designers include some sponsor links at the footer of their themes. That is a very bad idea.
Have a read of this and then decide if you should rel="nofollow" or just not bother with the links whatsoever: http://searchengineland.com/googles...nless-you-are-spamming-at-a-huge-scale-171486 My advice would be to not bother. The clients have paid you to make a site, so that should be payment enough. Obviously you missed the issues people have with footer links/side wide links. The same as above. What a surprise, just the same. You are contradicting yourself. You got it right in the end - what the OP wants to do is a bad idea. Also garbage, the ones the OP wants to make are irrelevant and unnatural.
I also enquire because I am indecisive about networking my own websites with site-wide links. I see alot of network websites (like cheezburger) do this. The sites I want to network are funny-insults.com, funfactz.com, funnysentences.com, shortstories101.com. Some are more related than others.
This is a bit different and more relevant (at least the ones I have seen on cheezburger and damnyouautocorrect). They do it for their audience, the links are easily accessible from the navigation. I don't see any problem and no reason to nofollow (as long as you are branding correctly, so Google understands they are all part of the same "network" and linked in a legitimate way).
Could you please clarify? Yes, but I've read on some many places not to place site-wide links. My sites are already horrifically damaged in Google. Not through a manual penalty, but something else. I'm not sure, so even a small issue like this makes me nervous.