Backlink or Spam?

We have a website of more than 1000+ pages. At footer of website we have an option to write Powered by Keyword. On keyword we are giving link of our site. My question is wether to use keyword and give link to our site or use an open link. Please suggest as if we use keyword will be mark as spam by google or not?

AFAIK (though I didn’t find any Google documentation just now) Google pretty much ignores footer links altogether.

Could you elaborate on “ignore”? In terms of SEO importance? I assume that’s what you meant? (Asking from ignorance, not aggression.)

Google includes

Widely distributed links in the footers or templates of various sites

in its list of “unnatural links that may violate our guidelines”.

If you then use a keyword instead of the company name for the link, I imagine that looks even more like “unnatural linking” to Google.

The advice is to mark such links as “nofollow” to avoid possible adverse effects on your ranking.

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IIRC it was that most sites have the footer links on every page.
eg. “contact us”, “powered by”, “about” etc.

And because they are so ubiquitous, they don’t have the same value as a relevant link in an article that appears only once, so Google pretty much ignores them.

That is, Google might consider them all as “one link” but won’t think “OMG, this link appears 100’s of times, it must be extremely important”

That makes sense. For some reason, I thought your ignoring made me think of it not even indexing them (ludicrous, I know.) Which I was befuddled by since codepen doesn’t do any sort of menu, but instead has a button for the application and then the rest of the page in the footer.

I’m doing a similar approach for something and I wanted to make sure I wasn’t going to be screwed over. Thanks for the update.

Yes, Google is all about giving users the best search results possible. It wouldn’t be in their business’ best interest to pack a SERP with a lot of “TOS” etc. pages.

I think you’ll be marked as spam, considering that it’ll probably be considered as an unnatural link - you’ll have at least a thousand links pointing to a single domain. Try putting a nofollow attribute on it or avoid linking it altogether.

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