Hello, I would like to ask a question to Experts in SEO. I'm webmaster and have built 100s of the websites. For every single website I built I always put a credit link to the footer of the website with the anchor text "web design" hyper-linked to my website. My website lost it's ranking about 1 year ago, and what ever I do it is not getting back to those keywords that I appeared on top for many years. The only how you can see my website on first position, if you type my company name (exactly). I submitted reconsideration request on Webmaster Tools and received answer that I have artificial links linking to my website and I need to remove them. So I went ahead and submitted link disallow request, using tool Google lately provided. I specified all link from 100s websites, that I built for many years, I only left the links what is pointing to my website form my clients website. Do you think those links form my clients website also will be leading to penalization? I appreciate your response and professional opinion. Thank you,
Yes it may also leads to penalization. Because you are getting backlinks from your clients website which may not related to your niche. It might considered as an unnatural link by Google and you give the chance to it to penalize your website. It is better to remove those links from your clients websites. Try to get some related and high quality backlinks to get back to your position on Google.