Swapping links among all my clients' sites

[enchant]

I'm a website designer and currently maintain sites for about 50 customers. Some of them have totally abysmal rankings in Google, and I think that it might have to do with the fact that they have almost no outside links to them. (backlinks is the term, I believe?)

So I was wondering...

Will it be of any help to these pages if I were to create a page with a list of links to all of the sites, copy it into each root directory and link it to each of their sites? Basically, they'd all be exchanging links with each other.

Is this something that might help, or does Google have anything internal that will recognize relatively identical lists and ignore (or possibly penalize) them?

[BradleyT]

I wouldn't do it. The only way I would consider this is if they were all in the same niche or somehow related. And if that were the case then I'd use a different linking strategy.

[Wlauzon]

I think about the only valid way to do it is to have some kind of portfolio site with a link to each of them. (leave out any really ugly or dead ones, of course.. )

To just have a copy of all the site links on each site I think would be dangerous as far as the SE's go.

[edited by: Wlauzon at 8:03 pm (utc) on Feb. 6, 2009]

[enchant]

I recently re-did my portfolio page. I used have them link directly to their site (www.example.com), but since some of them occasionally neglect to pay their registrar bill, the links would be broken, which reflects poorly on me. So now the links on my portfolio site point to www.mywebsite.com/example.com/index.html, etc., so if their domain goes away, the page is still accessible.

But it sounds like this idea might not be a great one, so I guess I'll not pursue it. Thanks, folks.

[bwnbwn]

enchant
Might be a way here to make some more revenue by offering them some seo help here and maybe "cough" doing some one ways between them. I didn't say that I just thought that.

[enchant]

Thanks for the cough. ;)

I find that the customers I have that are most concerned about SE placement are the same ones that can't possibly spend an extra nickel on my services and want me to come up with creative ways that will allow them to save money on their website maintenance.

That said, it seems that SEO technology is such a black art. The more I look into it to educate myself, the more it seems that there's simply TOO much to possibly absorb in one lifetime.

[Robert Charlton]

I never link among client sites for ranking purposes.

Those who do, I feel, eventually get sloppy about it, and it appears to Google that you have a closed network, which perhaps you do. ;)

I know others may take a different approach on this, particularly among sites of common ownership. I'll occasionally link from, say, a corporate site to a product site, but I'll sometimes use nofollow to isolate them.

I wouldn't link from a portfolio site either. I don't identify my clients publicly. Definitely wouldn't link to them on the web.

[enchant]

I wouldn't link from a portfolio site either. I don't identify my clients publicly.

Why is this? How do you show people your work?

[Robert Charlton]

Why is this? How do you show people your work?

The original question wasn't about designer links. It was about interlinking client sites for SEO purposes. But if you're a designer who's also doing SEO work, the same considerations reply. If you're a designer who thinks interlinking client sites is a good approach, you shouldn't be doing SEO work.

I was answering the question as an SEO. I treat my SEO client information with the same kind of confidentiality that a lawyer or doctor would treat information about their clients.

Just as a lawyer wouldn't want a client walking around wearing a sign saying "I've just been rescued from tax problems by my attorney," you wouldn't want client sites to wear signs saying that they've gotten top results in Google because of SEO help.

I'm not talking about hats or hat colors.... I'm talking about basic marketing principles. While once upon a time it was considered novel to say: "As advertised on TV," I don't think it's ever been considered helpful to say: "As SEOed on Google." This is true even if your SEO work consisted of making the site crawlable, focussed, better organized, and more useful to potential customers.

For an extended discussion with more of my thoughts on SEO client links, see...

Client links to SEO - Yay or Nay?
[webmasterworld.com...]

For another discussion on linking among client sites, see...

Is Linking Between Client Sites A Bad Thing?
[webmasterworld.com...]

WebmasterWorld site search, btw, can be amazingly helpful in finding such threads. ;)