Website credits for designers - good or bad

[Cocoonfxmedia]

Hi My core service is web design and development. I often place a credit on my clients websites pointing them back to my web design or web development pages. Is this a wise practice with penguin and panda updates? Would this also pull my ranking down?

[ThompsonPaul]

Wow, yea... 85,000 incoming footer links would be a problem

Do let us know in a followup if you see a difference.

Good luck!

P.

P.S. And thanks for the 'good answer' vote

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[Cocoonfxmedia]

That is actually an excellent approach, I have looked at two clients sites on as 50,000 links back to my hosting page and another has 35,000 back to my design page. The link is within the footer of everypage. (one site has news items updating every 30mins so that's why the numbers are so high) I can easily change the footers to no follow and then ask if I can put a little sentence into the about page on there site saying thanks to me creating the site. I can implement this change on the big site instantly as they allow me to do what I want to the site:o) Excited to see if this makes a difference now thanks

[ThompsonPaul]

I'm going to suggest a hybrid of a number of the approaches mentioned, Cocoon. And the reason is because you essentially have two different purposes in mind.

The footer links should be thought of as click-generating links for real eyeballs. You want to make it easy if someone like the site you designed to be able to find you as the developer. So it's primary purpose is click-throughs. Design it as the call to action you think will best generate clickthroughs.Making the anchor text a little different on each site can't hurt either.

Being sitewide, and on several different sites, these footer links are prime candidates for Penguin devaluation, so no-follow these. Which isn't a problem because you're designing them for clickthrough, not rank-passing anyway.

Then, see if you can get an editorial link from the website as well. "About" pages can be ideal for this as they usually rank fairly well so can pass some juice. And it makes sense that an About page might talk about the folks who built the site. An added advantage is that About pages don't generally have a huge number of additional links, so there's more juice to pass.

And DEFINITELY try to get reviews from your satisfied clients on Google and Yelp at least. Web designers don't typically show up in local search features, but getting the reviews to help your Google+ Local page to rank as well is still very valuable.

Interested to know what you think of this approach.

Paul

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[NeilD]

We are about to change how we do link back to our site with the method you describe e.g. home page only link which goes to a the project page for that client on our website.

What's the most appropriate format for such a footer link? Should the footer link be brand name text or keyword text or image link with an appropriate alt tag?

[WhoWuddaThunk]

The main intent with the footer link is to try acquire additional clients, so just having it in a blog post can potentially cost you business.  However, you do have to worry about over-optimizing yourself due to all the links with exact match anchor text.  There was actually a different blog post about this recently:

http://searchenginewatch.com/article/2239260/Using-Footer-Links-to-Diversify-Your-Backlink-Profile

In the article it suggested creating a page on your website specifically about this project.  This ensures that you link to a relevant page, in Google's eyes, as well as a relevant page for anyone that is interested in your services.  The blog also suggests no-following all of the links minus the one on the home page.  That way you still get a decent amount of link juice, but don't have to worry about a site-wide link.

[Cocoonfxmedia]

That's a sound solution , I ve been adding to the footer. Possible get them to write review on google places reviews. Think need to change my approach. Cheers Takeshi

[TakeshiYoung]

I think it's still a fine way of getting links, as long as you're not overdoing it.  Instead of spamming anchor text links in the footers like a lot of companies do, you could try just having a link on the homepage, or have them write a blog post about your company with an in-context link.