As an agency we build loads of websites, microsites and other online items for our clients and, like everyone else, we like to put a little copyright statement at the bottom of the template which says we did it and links back to our site (client permitting!). Nothing wrong with that I hear you say, well we would agree with you but recent research has shown that these links, if used on every page, can actually have a detrimental effect on your search engine placement.
These site wide links are now being frowned upon by the major search engines as they are more likely to be purchased links or, in this case, used to further advertise another entity which is not actually relevant to the site content. One would normally feel that the major SE’s would just give lower weighting to these links compared to more unique links, however, it is appearing that Google in particular is going further and actually penalising you for site wide links. See this article for more information: http://www.seopedia.org/internet-marketing-and-seo/are-your-indexed-pages-way-lower-than-they-should-be/
So – how do we get around it? We obviously want to keep our copyright statements on these pages and ideally we would like to provide a link back to our own website for interested users – but we don’t want to get penalised for this. So, in comes our friend JavaScript to lend a hand. We find one page on the site which either is most relevant to our services or generates the most traffic and we put a standard link on that one page only – this gives you a single unique link which is always useful for link building. Then on the other pages we put the same statement (or different if you prefer) but we create the link by using JavaScript – this link is not followed or indexed by the search engines and so will not flag as a site-wide link to the SE’s. We did look at using the nofollow tags but after much debate we didn’t want it to look like we didn’t trust our own sites – better that the link is not visible at all than seen as untrustworthy!
So there you have it – you now get a good quality unique link, copyright information on all pages and a link which can be followed by human visitors on every page – all with no detrimental effect to your SERPs position. Fab!!
Tags: SEO