Like most website designers, we often place links in footers stating that we designed the website and linking it back to our home page. This year it seems like a variety of steps have been taken by search engines to not only discount these footer links, but to penalized them. What was once a routine, maliciousness attempt to give your firm credit for a website design you were proud of, can now harm you.

There are many ways to go about making these links more Google ‘insert animal here’ update friendly.

1. Change the pages you are linking to. Why not throw a few links at your portfolio page or blog? They are all passing ‘juice’ back to the homepage anyways.

2. Vary your anchor text, a lot. I had to learn the hard way to stop making every footer anchor text my city and service. With the new found love Google has for brands, linking your brand name is just as effective and much less likely to hurt you.

3. Don’t use all follow links across large sights. This is especially true for eCommerce sites. It is a penalty waiting to happen when you open your webmaster tools dashboard and see 20,000+ do follow links with the same anchor text from the same site. If you still want at least one do-follow link (on the home page) you can do it like this:

WORDPRESS

Find your theme’s footer file and edit your link like this (replace 20milesnorth.com with your domain obviously…or don’t haha):

Example 1 – just change your link to nofollow on every page except the home page:

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<a href="http://www.20milesnorth.com" 
<?php if (!ishome()) {echo 'rel="nofollow"';}
?>
>20 Miles North Web Design</a>

Example 2 – jChange your entire link on every page except the home page and add nofollow:

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<?php if (!ishome()) {?>
<a href="http://www.20milesnorth.com" rel="nofollow" >
http://www.20milesnorth.com</a>
<?php ;} else {?>
<a href="http://www.20milesnorth.com">
20 Miles North Web Design</a><?php ;} ?>

Tip: if you are getting an error with the !ishome() function, try the !is_front_page() instead, some themes work a bit differently.

Magento

Much the same as WordPress above, you just need to go and find your themes footer.phtml file and edit your link as I have below.
I added a few options like title tag change just as an example. The code below also adds a nofollow to every link besides the home page.

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<?php if( $this->getUrl('') == $this->getUrl('*/*/*', array('_current'=>true, '_use_rewrite'=>true)) ):?>
<a href="http://www.20milesnorth.com" title="Web Design and hosting">Web design and hosting</a> by 20 Miles North Web Design 
<?php else: ?>
<a href="http://www.20milesnorth.com" title="Website Design" rel="nofollow">Website design</a> by 20 Miles North Web Design 
<?php endif; ?>

We all love to self promote and the folks at Google understand this and have set guidelines to do so without getting hurt. This is semi-SEOish in that you are optimizing your anchor link portfolio to fall within the guidelines set by Matt Cutts and the gang. Do you have any special ways to switch this up? I would love to hear them.