I have a free hosting service, i was thinking about putting a Powered By link on the bottom of all my accounts, but since they are all on the same IP i wasn't sure if this was a good idea. Will I be penalized by SEs for doing this?
I tried it for a brief period of time and got some good human traffic. Could my rank be penalized for doing something like this? I'd be ok implementing the link again as long as I know it's not going to hurt me. If the text link will hurt me, what about a banner with no alt tags, would that be any better?
thanks for the replies, i had seen some posts around various forums, which made it seem like my site would be banned for doing something like this
No ban, just less weight from the links. There might be an added benefit coming from the pages that include the link, particularly if relevant content is present.
Ya, you will not get banned for this, but many links from same IP wont help you at all... still if you have good traffic from there its worth - after all we are all looking for the traffic itself, not the PR or smth... Traffic brings the sales...
I don't think it hurts, and not just for traffic. Every link brings information with it, and that might help the SEs identify and categorize, therefore rank better in the SERPs, any webpage. But that would be minimal from the same IP. Basically, if you have various pages/websites on the same IP, do link them, but for some real benefit, do that if they are somewhat related, or don't do it at all, waste of time and effort, even for traffic, because it would be hard to get it, and it would be irrelevant.