Web designers are like artists who come up with a beautiful page, and love to leave their signature at the bottom of their work. Their signature is usually a backlink to their company page which is normally located at the footer. They use their ‘company name’ as the anchor text which isn’t going to give them the full potential of that backlink. Instead of using an anchor text Local SEO they will use their company name like “Company Name”. The point is who searches for “Company name”? Those who are searching the company name are searching for it specifically because they already heard about the company. Those who search on any search engine will search for KEYWORDS not a company name unless they’re looking for more information on the company.
It’s very important to place a link on the footer of the page. The reason is that the footer appears on every page of the website. This helps to generate more juice from that link. A spiderbot may not find the page you have your link on, but if it’s in the footer then it will appear on every single page of the website. If Google likes one page better than the other it will not matter as your link will always appear at the bottom. Any new page or post that is created on that domain will remind the spiderbots of your footer link.
Another issue I’m seeing is that webmasters don’t use the bold tag on their backlinks. Imagine a spiderbot going through this new page you developed for your client. The whole page is using regular text but at the bottom of the page there is something that is SCREAMING FOR ATTENTION! It reads “Look at me I’m different from the rest because I have a bold tag!” The bold tag shows emphasis, so using an anchor text with the bold tag is telling the spiderbot that the link is very important.
Imagine looking for references for a company that you’re about to hire. Would it matter if the company’s reference is the owner’s brother or a close friend of the owner? I’m sure you’re going to want ‘more references’ from other places unless you’re very well acquainted with the owner’s brother or his close friend. I would look at this as an affiliation more than a reference.
abc.com IP 123 points to xyz.com IP 123 (looks like the same person) Client is a nobody so this is probably an affiliation
Google IP 123 points to YouTube IP 123 (same person but Major website involved) Huge affiliation pointing to another huge affiliation
abc.com IP 789 points to xyz.com IP 123 (different IP address, not the same person) This is more of a reference link than an affiliated link.
The links will now be references instead of affiliations.
