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In a past Q&A forum about web design companies adding footer links to the websites they make, I really liked Irving Weisses' solution where he stated: "I think the best solution is a dofollow homepage ONLY footer link. This is the highest PR page, usually the most traffic so good visibility for advertising,  you're not creating tons of sitewide links with identical anchor texts, and the owner is only leaking some PR on their homepage." I want to implement this but would like to know the best way to do this.  I deal Wordpress 95% of the time. Is there a plugin or CSS code that would allow me to put a Do follow link in the footer but make the link disappear on all the other pages? Thanks in advanced everyone 🙂 Wesley Barras, Houston, TX

Hi all, Any feedback on Squarespace, SEO capabilites and ranking factors? I have a client wishing to use the platform and despite the good reviews, which appear to be from resellers by the way, the forums say not. Although apparently Rand Fishkin, SEOMoz (yes right here!) gave them a big thumbs up “The square space team have put together a remarkable platform, SEO friendliness! Really not sure here and don’t agree, there are many limitations and hosting with a template provider is always big no no. Cheers
Virginia

So www.pch.com(portal) redirects to www.pch.com/unrecognized(landing page) if you are not registered with us and logged in.  This means that the search engines are not logged in, so they see only our landing page. It used to be that there was no portal/home, on pch.com, that was just the landing page, but that changed about 6 months ago.  We do rank for our brand terms, but my company would like to rank for terms like "sweepstakes." They DO understand why we don't, thankfully. They don't think SEO is magic voodoo. They get it. But they asked for options, as I have said that the portal on www.pch.com really is a good page to optimize for non-brand, core terms like sweepstakes....but only if the search engines can see it. I gave them these options, and they asked me to seek out more. So any thoughts would be good: 1. Best case scenario would be to abandon the landing page, just have the keyword rich portal page be the actual home page with no re-direct. (this won't happen, but I decided it needed to be first on my list). 2. Turn the portal into the home page (remove the redirect), but have the landing page overlay in a light box. This should, if I am not mistaken, be a best of both worlds situation, where the light box landing page would still have all of the value of the actual keyword rich portal page behind it. 3. If the landing page has to remain as it does now with the non-logged in redirect to it, change the URLs so that the landing page is www.pch.com and the portal becomes www.pch.com/members/ or something like that. Any other thoughts? Thanks! Kenn Gold Publishers Clearing House

So today Google have updated their Webmaster Guidelines and they have drawn particular attention to their update relating to Link Schemes. http://support.google.com/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=66356 Unless you have had your eyes closed and your fingers in your ears since February then most people are aware of the types of link schemes that the updated is refering to but there is one area that isn't so black and white for me. "Here are a few common examples of unnatural links that violate our guidelines: Widely distributed links in the footers of various sites" We are a design agency and we design and build lots of websites for our clients. It is pretty standard practice for agencies to add a credit to the footer of websites and we pick up a lot of work from people that see a site that they like and click through the footer link to our site. Our footer credit is standard on all of the websites that we create:- Website by Teapot Creative Only the 'Teapot Creative' part of the credit is anchor text so we are only linking using our brand name with no intention of manipulating search results. Is this going to hurt us? or will the fact that we are only linking using our branded term and without any SEO intent keep us in the clear? Thanks.
Ade.

Hi Can anyone answer this question confidently, I know Google is moving away from lots of links within the footer.  However we specialise in websites for the travel industry and having a link to all the areas at the footer can be quite handy.  Our websites complete this automatically. Here is an example where due to design of the site the links don't quite fit well, so we need to change anyway.  But before completing the work I wondered if there was a better way to do this. http://www.dreamvillasitaly.com/ Many thanks Andy

I link back to my website via my company name on the footers of sites I develop.  Lately I've been changing this to my keyword and mixing and matching.  This has been done for new sites I create and old sites I've not seen any benefit so far after a couple of months. Most my clients are hosted on the same server as my main site that it links back to. 1. Is this a bad idea to link back on the same IP?
2. Is footer backlinks to the main developer going to annoy Google?
3. Should I change my main site's server, will it help? All my competitors seem to do it and as far as I can tell they seem to get better results than I do.  Because I'm now changing them the reason I see no benefit? Thanks

I am working on a site redesign and re evaluating concepts I haven't thought about for a few years. I generally see site navigation that is either "top-down" or "left bar". Top down navigation normally uses the left nav. for search refinements. The benefit of top nav. is that it clears up the center of the page for non navigation content. The drawback is that you can't fit as many categories in a top nav. Left side nav. can hold a long list of categories, but subcategories are often in the center of the page. In the past, I have preferred to use left nav. with a multi level scroll over search refinement.  I believe this allowed users to get to their destination page with fewer clicks.  (I have always believed that every required additional click causes lost customers).  I also believe that this has caused me to get more juice flowing to deeper pages on sites and better long-tail conversion.  This means I have had pages with a LOT of links. With this method, I have tightly controlled my categories.  What on other sites are often dynamic search refinements, are on my sites additional categories. I am considering making a site with a top down navigation system.  I like the additional screen space in the center I get to work with.  Is my assumption about pages created by search refinement wrong?  Is it ok for SEO to have a left nav that has a bunch of search refinements that are dynamically created?

I see that you have already answered this question before back in 2007 (http://www.seomoz.org/qa/view/2163), but wanted to ask your current opinion on the same question: Should I add a site-wide footer link to my client websites pointing to my website, or should I create a "website credits" page on my clients site, add this to the footer and then link from within this page out to my website?