Hello, After the recent panda and penguin update I think I read that Google is penalizing Web Designer Websites (especially WordPress Designers) who place their links in their client websites in Footer. So if I add a my link to all the client site's footer then will it raise any RED flag? If it does then what if it's a NO-Follow link? Or a dofollow with my website's name itself as anchor (e.g. Powered by "My SiteName") and not using those "make money" kind of anchors. UPDATE: I think I remember now... It was about... Google penalized some Theme Designer's Sites... where low quality sites were linking to theme designer's site in footer (which is preloaded with free themes) - Minterest
Where did you read this nonsense? It's normal when you design or write something good you get a lot of links to your website.
Hey... its not natural backlinks for designing a good site... I am talking about backlinks in footer... That is... I design your blog and then add a link to my website in your footer.. E.g. "Designed by MyCompany". or "Powered by MyCompany"
Read it here: http://www.seomoz.org/blog/how-wpmuorg-recovered-from-the-penguin-update In my opinion it's nonsense that Google considers this to be spam, but it DID happen that a site was penalized for footer links on themes they created. Google basically confirmed that was the reason. Post-penguin, it is now a potentially dangerous tactic. The author of that SEOmoz article believes the problem was that they were using a "commercial" anchor text. So if you use a backlink with the name of you business like "john smith's designs" that might look less spammy that if you use something like "web design seattle"
Yeah thats it... I think its best if we follow Wordpress.org. A link back using domain name as anchor. E.g. "Powered by MySite.com"
that is because they were linked for the same anchor text from number of blogs which opted for that particular theme (designed)..,
If you read the SEOMoz article carefully you will see that they have a large percentage of back-links coming from another sites footer, which is what ultimately penalized them. You also have to make sure you have diversity and not a enormous percentage of your total links coming from the footer of a couple sites.
Were you looking for this one → LINK The guy called up Matt Cutts and two links from Wordpress site footers dropped his site from 8580 visits per day to 1527 visits. Social network marketing looks really good at the moment.
People should think about this beyond this situation as well. For example, it used to be a common practice to promote your own sites through footers on your other sites. I believe Google is now seeing this as unnatural.
Well. These are a great backlinks unless the sites has A LOT of pages, because this would mean for example if the site has 5000 pages, these are 5000 backlinks to your website from the SAME website... Which looks VERY un-natural for google!
Agree with you all... But what if the anchor is "Powered by MyDomain.com" like "Powered by WordPress.org" If it is still a problem then how about marking that as NoFollow?
Footer links were treated like any other links, but since they appear on every page of the website... Google has started discounting them. Google never target any specific niche, if any plumbing website is placing footer links, even it may get penalized.
If Google penalizes for backlinks from low quality sites then why are they not banning WordPress.org? Since almost all new blogs have a link to WP.org as default. So they must be getting backlinks from spammy sites as well. Is that because the anchor text is their brand name itself? Or is that because WP is too big to be penalized?