Where do you guys draw the line with this one.... Say you have a website totally unrelated to yours (website design), such as a website selling 5,000 different Washing Machines. Is a backlink in the footer from every page on this website useful, or will it be considered spammy by Google? Are you better to put nofollow on 4,999 pages, and one follow from the homepage perhaps? Does anyone use any other strategies for this?
Just put a link in the homepage's footer. Putting nofollow links to the inner pages wouldn't give you any SEO benefit. It's useless.
I agree although I personally hate web designer links in footers of web sites. If it's a theme or template that someone is giving away free of charge then I can see the designer requesting that the link remain, but if anyone does paid web design work for me then it will be in the contract that NO links to the web designer site will be placed on my site unless I decide I want one there... I bought the developer version of Thesis WordPress theme as much so that I could kill the footer link as I did so that I could create multiple sites with it.
I believe placing the link in the footer is fine. Worse case scenario, you won't get a heavy weight placed on the links since they're coming from the same site. But Footer links can be very helpful.
From my point of view footer links are always useful from the SEO point of view...as spider can scroll within our site more and more and index our site more easily and quickly...
Hello, I agree with "mrandrei" in that placing a footer link of a website that you designed is ok, as it gives rightful credit to your company. But spamming the site with more than just footer links just stupid because as "Canonical" said you were paid to design a site for your client, not advertise your own company. But that is just my opinion.
I seriously doubt that one link in the footer of a webpage is going to be the cause of a site being flagged as a link farm. Even if it did get flagged, if a link farm links to you it's not going to hurt you any, it just won't help. The problems start when you link to the bad neighborhood.
Yahoo! site explorer is currently showing 4,764,341 inbound links from external sites to one of my sites... Millions of those are site-wide footer links from lots of sites that have tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of pages each. I'm ranking #1 in a very competive space for countless keywords including 1 word phrases w/ 180,000,000+ results. It's not a problem...
Intersting posts - thanks guys.. I'm not asking whether it is ethically correct or not, purely in an SEO sense. I was thinking this would be an ideal scenario... The homepage has your anchor text as a dofollow, and everything other page has your brandname as a nofollow. That way you get the SEO value from the homepage, but you still get the clickthrough if someone likes your work, from every other page. Thoughts..?
First, I have to say that I have several sites that I work on daily, and of these sites I have the major ones all linking to each other. These links are at the bottom of the page and are displayed on over 100,000 pages. If I were to remove any one of these links, I would most likely see a good drop in my search position, maybe a page or two. Having this link setup will not hurt your SEO efforts at all, it will do the exact opposite. Second, if you always play it safe, then you'll never learn anything. Try different tactics, if you have a good ranking, and you do something that drops you down, then just go back to what you were doing before. SEO is a game of strategy, you have to implement new tactics in order to stay on top. Otherwise, you're destined to be passed by.
it would be far more professional to leave the web design link out to answer your question though, there won't be any issues with this. google knows what is "static" information and what it's there for, so you would see no problems from it.
I beleive footer links help you. I'm not a SEO expert, but when we've added some sites to our portfolio - with footer links to our site on each page - our site has gone up in the serps.
Links on footer to your own site might be ok and useful. But if there are exchanged links there, it might be punished.
It doesn't hurt you to put a "Designed by" link in the footer. My competitor in the keyword "Website Design Services" does that and he is #1 on Google. I am going to take the same tactic because I want to improve my SERPs and get credit for my hard work.
I wouldn't put exchanged links in the footer anyway, not if it's going to be displayed on every page of my site. If I'm only getting one link from them, they only get one link from me.