Thread

Anyone have any wisdom to share on the pros and cons of adding “Developed by My Company” and link to site footers?  Given the Panda update, I wonder if those links would hurt as they are coming from sites that have no keyword relevance, plus the link text is pretty much the same in every case.

To be honest, I do not think I ever got a lead from footer links anyhow, so just wondering if there is any point in doing it.

Thanks for any thoughts!

Roi

I’ve never cared for them. They always seemed at odds with the reason for the site and just a bit too desperate-feeling.  I figured if someone wanted to know who did the site they’d ask the business owner.

Thanks, Michael - I think that is a pretty good assessment.  I started adding links years ago and stopped doing it last year.  I am about to rebrand my company and that raised the issue of revising all the old sites to reflect the new name, which in turn, made me wonder if I should just go and delete them all!

Roi

In a nut shell, they’re not a good idea and could hurt you. The whole “I will link to you if you link to me” is typically a bad idea. See the following links; for some reasons why it’s more a bad idea, then good.

http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356

http://wpmu.org/wordpress-penguin-google-matt-cutts/

If you do want to do it (i.e. which may be a good idea for really innovative and high profile sites), then ensure you use a nofollow tag: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow

If you really want to look more into this, and try figure out what may and may not work I would suggest looking here at the StackExchange community: http://webmasters.stackexchange.com/search?q=[seo]+backlinks.

Also, Matt Cutt’s (Head of Google’s Webspam team) blog is very, very, very insightful and has heaps of good (and legitimate) information on SEO: http://www.mattcutts.com/blog/. If Matt says do something, do it. If he says don’t do something, don’t do it!

Thanks for that, Michael.  I read some similar posts, which is what originally got me thinking that it was not a good thing.  So, I have given up on that technique for link building and marketing!

Roi

We don’t do it for a few reasons, but one thing people don’t think about, adding the link and ‘developed by’ pointing back to your site also leaves you vulnerable to any penalties Google might place on the website it’s on. You have no control over the content of that site, so there’s no telling what weight it carries.

Granted that’s a very small issue, but it is something to keep in mind.

Anyway, we don’t do it, however, we do put a meta tag in the header for our work (just first names)

P.S. Boyink! makes a very good point regarding the desperation feeling. Usually those seem to be done with a friend does some design work for a website.

Interesting, I put “Site Credits” and a link back to my site on every project I do (if it’s something I’m proud of at least). Not sure if I’ve been penalized by Google or not, by I sure get a lot of referral traffic to my site.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this, JT.  There are indeed multiple “google” issues, especially given all the attention they have recently given to links (and about time, too!).  That alone is reason enough to avoid footer links.

The other side of this is one of “attribution”.  I do not completely agree that having your company name somewhere on the site is needy.  I view it as attribution, albeit not very effective!  Artists sign their works, photographers add rights usage metadata to their photos, so why shouldn’t we do the same?  Is it really any different that putting screen shots of your work on your own site?

Food for thought…

I’m late to the discussion, but there are some additional thoughts and great comments here: http://erikreagan.com/blog/building-websites-footer-credits/

(two year old post though)

Since that post there’s been an intriguing effort behind humans.txt, but that reaches a different audience than footer credits.

We add “site by” to the footer’s of 99% of our projects and have been doing it since we started nearly 10 years ago.

It brings in new business for us, it also brings in return business.

As time moves on, there will be employee turnover at the organizations we build for, and the new folks won’t have a clue who built their site or how to look into the code to find out. Our link at the bottom helps them find us, and we know it works. We would much rather work on an EE site we developed, than one built by a weekend warrior any day. Last year over 85% of the projects we launched were for previous/existing clients and we know those footer links played a role.

Nearly all of our work is for schools and nonprofits, and having thousands of inbound links from our targeted client base shouldn’t be hurting our SEO.

We want our clients to know that we’re as proud of their website as they are and putting our link in the footer is part of how we “walk our talk”.

We get phone calls every month where someone will say, “We were looking at websites and your name just kept coming up at the bottom, so we would like to talk to you about our project”. That didn’t happen overnight, but it did happen now that we have over 200 launched sites out there.

Desperately yours, 😉

- Kurt

Whoops, screwed up and wrote this while logged in as one of my clients!

Erik, thanks for the link to that blog post - very interesting indeed.  I have read about humans.txt, but wonder how useful it is in terms of marketing to potential clients.

Kurt, do you have any thoughts on the potential negative factors given the Penguin update?  Google is specifically targeting questionable inbound links, and footer links of the type being discussed here could easily fall into that category.  Perhaps we should petition for a new rich snippet tag just for web developers and footer links?:coolsmile:

Hi Roi,

I’m not loosing sleep over changes that Google makes, we’ll just adapt and adopt here. From what I’ve read, I don’t think it’s changes are going to hurt any of my clients sites or our own. I’m sure if any of our clients get warning from Google or some law firm, they’ll let us know. We’re on retainer with most of our clients, so they don’t hesitate to communicate with us when something happens like that.

I would advise that anyone with concerns do some actual testing, and not put too much weight into what you read in blogs.

As an example, there where a couple of highly quoted blog posts a few years back that stated the underscores and dashes were being treated equally by Google, and yet some argued that one or the other was the proper way to go. We did about 4 hours of tests and found that underscores were being treated like a word connector and that dashes were being treated like a word separator. So, “user_guide” and “userguide” would bring up nearly identical results, but “user-guide” would bring up different results, and the results we liked happened more often when we used dashes. From the day forward, we use dashes in our URI’s. I think some SEO experts are probably still arguing over what’s better all these years later.