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Originally Posted by Gravitate
I am a web design company in Portland, Oregon and am interested in being found for the keyword phrase "Portland Web Design". Many of my clients kindly provide a link back to my site that says "Website Design by Gravitate Design Studio". We have created 100's of sites that have this exact text linking back to us. I have a couple of questions:
1. Should I use slightly different anchor text in these links? I don't want to do anything spammy, but maybe just have my company name in the URL and the words "Website design" won't be part of the link.
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Hello,
Gravitate - welcome to WPW - these are excellent questions and I must say in advance I don't have answers for all of them. Regarding #1, I don't see how it could be or why it would be viewed as a problem - that's who you are and what you do. Many of the links pointing to my site have the same or at least quite similar text in the links and I have seen any harm accruing to me from this.
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2. Typically, I place this link at the bottom of each page in a client's site as part of the copyright footer. Does it matter if I have links from every page, or is it better to have it from just one?
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This is potentially a different issue - I would think that having the link at the bottom of the home page for each site would be sufficient - having it on every page won't provide any increase in benefit and could conceivably be harmful... best case scenario is it will only be counted as one link to you anyway so why risk it?
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3. Since many of my clients sites have nothing to do with web design, do I get penalized by Google for having these links, or do they simply give it little weight?
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With the exception of identified link farms, as far as I know there is no way such links can hurt you... but see #2 above.
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4. I provide links in my portfolio to many of my client's sites, and they link to me. Does Google view this as a link exchange? I don't want to do anything weird that would get any of us penalized.
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I don't have a definitive answer to this one but logically I would see this as a fairly standard and legitimate practice - I don't
think you'd be penalized for this (anyone with evidence to the contrary please jump in here!).