Thread: Backlink Advice

Hello IMTer's,

Was wondering if you could give me advice, let's say you are a web design company and have made over 6,000 websites and more than 5,000 of those sites you made have a back link in the footer for the same keywords such as the following:

Affordable Web Design, Hosting and SEO by XXXXXXXXX

Affordable Web Design, Hosting and SEO are linking back to our company web site. Will this cause a massive penalty?

The links are just the company taking credit for designing these sites but I was thinking surely this is not a good idea anymore right?

Thanks Guys


PS. Never Really Thought About It Till I Decided To Make Changes To The Company Website But We Have Been Leaving Links On Customers Websites For Years.

We are currently on page 5 for Web Design Warrington and I am sure it used to be on page 1, could it be a 50% ban from Google? should I have those back links changed out?

I would suggest getting into the ones you still have access to and varying the anchors. Make about 50% of them just your company name, and take out the seo bit on most.

Reako: I'm unclear if you HAVE been seriously punished by Google -- or if you're WORRIED your at risk for it....

From what I can tell your footer text is showing up on over 300,000+ pages in Google USA results. SEMRush shows you don't rank for ANY keywords in the Top 20 of SERPS at Google - typical of a site that's had it's top money keywords choked off. From what I can tell with Market Samurai - you do seem to have a very high-quality backlink profile from those client sites, without any low-ball Article/Directory kraplinks showing up.

A -50 penalty is as good as fatal, any relevant keywords will be stuck between the 40th-60th positions. If you do get any Google traffic at all, I'll bet it's only rarely and on obscure and very, very odd long-tail key phrases.

Is it even realistic to think you could remove or re=nofollow footer links on thousands of domains/tens of thousands of sitewide pages? How would you even begin to 'dilute' thousands of over-used anchor texts? Even if you disavowed every one of them, You'd probably NEVER regain the rankings you once had. And if you 301 Redirect that domain to a new one, I'd bet within 30 days, the -50 penalty would follow it and KILL and POISON the new one too.

Unlike other fools and Google syncophants in this (and other forums), your chances of 'revcovering' are an illusion. Google doesn't give a damn if your site ever ranks again or not. The real question is - can your business survive on Bing/Yahoo/Social Media traffic/Other Sources or not? Otherwise, utterly rebranding the business and starting CLEAN on a new domain and utterly leaving every single bit of the toxic past behind is the only realistic expectation.

Sorry if I sound so negative and blunt, but I've killed and penalized DOZENS of my own domains using only 500 to 1000 backlinks. NONE have ever recovered from trying to diversify anchor text, by adding so-called 'Quality Content', by fiddling with On-Page metrics, by sending important Social Signals, etc.

yes, you are in danger of getting a penalty. Godaddy has done something similar with some badgets a few months ago, and they were ranking on the first position for "SSL certificates". After Google has penalized them, they now rank on position 15.

If you don't want to link back to them then nofollow them or remove them!

Thanks for the replies guys, I do appreciate all your help.

---------- Post added 04-30-2014 at 04:36 PM ----------

I focus on customers websites but decided to take a look at the company website and see how it was optimized as it was done before I started at the company. I realized that each page for each of our customers websites link back to the company website with the same anchor text SEO or Webdesign.

And so I checked some rankings and noticed we are doing poor. So surely the company website has to be penalized right?

I am not worried, most sales are made via the phone and this does not impact us badly but still I would prefer not to be penalized.

I appreciate you leaving a reply, thanks alot m8