35 replies to this topic

[compar]

Sorry azs- we tend to wander a bit off topic around here.

What your sites have in common is the designer, right? That is relevant.

I would agree with Scottie. As I've said elsewhere we put up a link on our company web site to every site we host. It is in the hosting section and under the general heading of "sites we host". I have always been amazed at how fast Google picks up these links and how they seem to value them.

With this in mind we decided just a few days ago to add a list to our SEO service page that says "web site we've optimized". We only did this within the last week or ten days and I have already seem Google report these links.

Every page in our company web site has a PR4 or better. I don't know if this makes the links more valuable, but I know that Google has no problem at all with these links.

BTW the fact that they are from our own web site to sites we host, means that all the sites are on one server. Now we have a couple of blocks of IP addresses, but nevertheless many of these site share a C Class block and the links still get picked up and reported.

[azs]

True...but you can't argue with power and reach Google has...

[azs]

my last comment was in response to

"But you shouldn't be building sites for Google- you should be building them for business..."

[excell]

When adding design or website credits to a client site it is also a good idea to optimise it for the best benefit of the client...especially if there is a geographical tie.

[compar]

When adding design or website credits to a client site it is also a good idea to optimise it for the best benefit of the client...especially if there is a geographical tie.

Thats an interesting comment. I have been thinking about that in the last few days. What we do is have is name the owner, company or organization whose site it is and then make the URL itself clickable.

Google seem to pick these up and value them so highly that I don't think there would be any advantage to changing the anchor text on these links to the site's prime keyword phrase. And in addition to that it would look strange on our listing I think.

If you are interested in seeing how we list them here is the URL.

[excell]

I did mean on the client site to the designer , but there is no reason why you couldn't optimise your links from your site to your client sites in such a way as to give them a relevancy factor or key phrase/word link in common.

[compar]

I did mean on the client site to the designer , but there is no reason why you couldn't optimise your links from your site to your client sites in such a way as to give them a relevancy factor or key phrase/word link in common.

On the client's site we just add our credit line at the bottom of every page. It says "Designed, Hosting, SEO by (a discrete copy of our logo)". Of cousre we only list the services we have provided to that particular site. Only our logo is clickable at the moment, but we have been thinking of making each service name listed clickable.

Edited by compar, 01 September 2003 - 11:25 AM.

[excell]

Cannot you find anything in common with them?

[compar]

Cannot you find anything in common with them?

I don't see how this would be possible on a lot of sites. But as I've said just using their URL as a link from our site seems to be fine with Google.

[Sharon & Roy]

What say ye to this statement made by a Google department director according to martinibuster (message #7)?

The links won't pass all of the PR if it's coming from an off-topic website (i.e. a website that's not about web design), according to a Google department director. She said it, and I followed up, and she repeated the point, confirming that a web designer's inbounds will pass deprecated PR if the link is coming from an off-topic website.

So don't expect much.

I think this is how they identify and deprecate guestbook links as well.

This is all I'm going to say on the subject.

That was in reply to the following question.

As a site designer I want to have links on all of my client's pages that link back to me (to help with my rank).

Is one link per site good enough? Should the link be on their homepage or within the site? Does it matter?

Your Friends,

Sharon & Roy

[qwerty]

I hope that's the way Google sees it, as it makes perfect sense to me to do things that way. Any link (apart from those coming from "bad neighborhoods") should count, but off-topic sources should count less. If my site is about organic farming, then a link to my site from another organic farming site is a more relevant vote in my favor than a link from a site about cellular phone plans.

[daniel]

Hi Sharon and Roy

What say ye to this statement made by a Google department director according to martinibuster (message #7)?


QUOTE 
The links won't pass all of the PR if it's coming from an off-topic website (i.e. a website that's not about web design), according to a Google department director. She said it, and I followed up, and she repeated the point, confirming that a web designer's inbounds will pass deprecated PR if the link is coming from an off-topic website.

So don't expect much.

I think this is how they identify and deprecate guestbook links as well.

This is all I'm going to say on the subject.

I have a question about this.

How does Google determine if a website is off-topic. For a start, the 'topic' of the website as a whole shouldn't matter - surely it's limited to the actual page. On top of this, how can Google automatically determine what the topic of a page is? It would need to be tagged with accurate metadata for a computer to understand the content - and we're some time away before search engines start understanding content.

Do you have any more on this?

It sounds slightly suspect to me, but I might just be getting the wrong end of the stick.

Cheers,

Daniel

[Jill]

It's a great idea if they could actually do it. But my guess is that it's a whole lot of baloney!



Jill

[SearchRank]

Unless a client specifically objects, we place a Website Design by ...(our company name with hyperlink)" on every page. It does bring alot of referred business, people viewing a site we did, liking the work and wanting one themselves. We have been doing this since 1997, long before Google came on the scene so I don't know how they feel about it and don't care. We don't put the links there on every page to try to increase our PR, but rather it is simply part of the copyright data and doesn't look obtrusive at all.

We do not place SEO type links on sites that we provide SEO for because of confidentiality between us and clients. If you are getting good positioning for them, they don't want their competitors to know why or how which I can fully understand. Besides this, I think I would be afraid that Google might punish an SEO for having a bunch of SEO related credits all over the place. Look what happened to WebSeed.

[DaveBeck]

I started placing referral links on the sites that we have designed way before I knew anything about link popularity and have picked up much more work from these links over anything received via search engines.

This especially counts for local clients who would like to deal with local designers.