Clients Linking Back en Masse - Does it harm us?

[SEOmnivore]

Scenario:
We're a software as a service company and several of our clients use our site for posting their company "widgets".

One client has a link to our site (specifically to their corporate page on our website) within their universal top navigation. The link in their nav says "widgets" and points to their page on our site.

Since it's in their top nav across their site, that's over 100,000 pages with links to the one page on our site.

We aren't trying to be spammy, it's just the way things work out.

So what are people's opinions? Does this hurt us? I know it doesn't help us for SEO, but is it worth disavowing? If multiple clients do this will we be penalized?

[aakk9999]

Hello SEOmnivore and welcome to WebmasterWorld!

What about asking your client to add rel="nofollow" to this link?

[SEOmnivore]

This is an option we're aware of, but not sure how feasible it is.

We actually have much more than one client doing this. They range from small to very big companies and I'm not sure it's realistic for us to get this done retroactively. Moving forward we can institute the no-follow as a standard procedure but for the hundreds of thousands of links already established across a few sites, it's tricky.

But if no-follow isn't an option, would you disavow? Would you just ignore and hope everything is fine?

[netmeg]

They should be relevant, shouldn't they? Have you noticed any issues with search engines yet?

Me, I'd probably let them alone until I noticed it was affecting me adversely, but I'm like that about links.

[SEOmnivore]

We have not noticed anything, netmeg.

But we've done this forever and clients have done this forever. I wonder if we'd rank higher if we disavowed these.

Many of our clients just link back to their page once and that's fine. It's the ones that plaster those links across their entire site we're worried about.

[FranticFish]

I don't think Google have ever said that they have a problem with sitewide links per se.

Here's Matt Cutts in November 2012: [youtube.com...]

A site that has sitewide footer links to unrelated sites in different niches using 'optimised' anchor texts - that would look like an attempt to game Google.

But there are other sitewide links that are fine, here are a few:
- businesses that link to a charity donation page (often in a footer)
- businesses that display trade affiliations or memberships
- blogrolls (still used innocently by millions of blogs and no cause for concern)
- shopping cart security icons

Whatever you decide, remember that disavow is basically intended to say 'This is a crappy link that I don't want and I can't get the site owner to remove it'. You could do some real damage if you start messing about with it in the manner you propose.

[bwnbwn]

I think your key phrase is

But we've done this forever and clients have done this forever.

I myself wouldn't worry to much over it. Sounds like to me the clients are proud to use your product and want to let their clients know they are getting the best from their services by using your services.

[SEOmnivore]

Much thanks for the feedback guys.

[Planet13]

Question:

How does the original poster's situation differ in regards to that one wordpress theme site that was (supposedly) hammered for having all the links in the footer pointing back to their (the theme developer's) site?

[FranticFish]

The way I read it, the clients don't HAVE to link to SEOmnivore's site, whereas with a link embedded in a theme or widget the link is built in and there is no choice.

I think that's the difference: it's a voluntary, editorial-style decision based on merit.

[netmeg]

Actually, that's not the way I read it, but I'm not sure I can explain it. It's a SAAS site, so the client's application resides on the OP's server. So to the client, it's like linking to another section of their site, that just happens to be hosted on SEOmnivore's site.

Whereas a bunch of theme links in WordPress footers - that's not reeeeeeaaaalllly relevant, if you think about it. I mean, sure, it's relevant to the *design* of the site, but in most cases it's probably not relevant to the topic or niche of the site. And now that it's been abused so much, it probably doesn't matter if it IS relevant - theme footer links are just more trouble than they're worth now.

Admittedly it's a fine line, but a SAAS application falls on one side and a WordPress theme link falls on the other side of that line in my book, and I'm guessing Google's on the same page of that book too. I could be wrong, but that's how I see it.

[Planet13]

Huh...

well, that is a different situation, I guess.

I am not familiar with SAAS, so are the individual client sites on different domain names?

Or am I totally missing the program here?

[netmeg]

No, they're on SEOmnivore's domain.