Google’s recent Penguin updates have resulted in adverse rankings for websites with several backlinks that contain identical anchor text. Webmasters that have taken great pains to design a client’s website could end up punishing their clients’ rankings as well as their own by way of adding backlinks on their client’s website.
However, here are a few footer link tips that should help you as a webmaster to get due recognition for a well-designed website, avoid the Penguin’s wrath, and receive improved SERPs in the process. One important tip is to avoid the problem of getting all your links to steer to your homepage. Instead, you should ensure that the footer link on your client’s site leads to your portfolio page made using the next tip rather than your homepage once you have a relevant portfolio entry on your own site.
You can ensure that your backlink is relevant to the website of your client by making a design portfolio page that uses your own key phrases along with the key phrases of your client. This will eliminate the problem of zero relevancy and convince major search engine bots that your website is related and relevant to your client’s site. You can achieve this by optimizing the page title, body text, images, and the H1 and H2 tags of your client and your own site to ensure relevancy.
Another important tip is to avoid keeping the same anchor text in the webmaster footer link such as “Website designed by…” Instead, you can mention the client’s long-tailed keywords in the anchor text followed by your name. For instance, your footer link for your client’s car cleaning services website could read as “Car Cleaning Services Website designed by…” This move will additionally build authority thanks to your efforts in hyper-linking with a relevant webpage on your site, which in turn will improve SERPs.
One last footer link tip is to avoid the problem of excessive Dofollow links from same domain as your link will appear on the bottom of each page of your client’s website. This could raise a red flag for major search engines including Google and could result in punitive action. You will have to write a simple “rel=nofollow” program code to your footer link on all client pages other than the homepage. There are different ways of writing this program depending on your programming language and your server type.
The above footer link tips should help you avoid falling foul with most search engines including the Penguin algorithm update from Google and get the recognition you deserve for designing your client’s websites.