Raleigh Search Engine Optimization
Working on SEO type things and the more I looked at my rankings, the more I didn’t like something – sitewide links. Sitewide links are where your link appears on ALL pages of a website – mmm… sort of like on almost ALL web sites created by a web design company.
Standard Practice
As far as my SEO clients, I do usually try to knock down those sitewide links as the authorities (who have ideally actually TESTED these theories) indicate that they’re bad. Since AHrefs.com does break these down into sitewide and non-sitewide links, I’m sort of leaning that way. Matt Cutts indicates that they are given a “diminishing returns” status, but I am not necessarily riding the Matt Cutts bandwagon anyway. Let’s face it, if he actually TOLD us what Google was looking for, wouldn’t it just be like shooting fish in a barrel for SEO people?
Always tweaking things to see how they react, I came up with this little PHP blurb. Simple and straightforward if you’re working in WordPress. Either toss it into the footer.php file in a proper place or if you’re using one of the premium themes, they’ll likely have a hook area that you can throw it in before the end body tag.
This little blurb will throw me ONE and ONLY ONE backlink on the homepage – the most influential usually and then just list the company name on all subsequent pages. So if someone wants to know who did the site, they can still find it, but you don’t get 98% of your backlinks showing as sitewide to Google et al. While I’m sure they DO have geniuses coming up with their little algorithms for sharing love to sites as only they see fit, I’ll not be hoping that they allow web design companies some leeway with huge percentages of sitewide links and downranking others.
I’ll be keeping up with the results to see what kind of effect that has on things.
<?php
if ( is_front_page() ) {
echo 'Site by http://lizardwebs.net · Raleigh';
} else {
echo 'Site by Lizardwebs.net Raleigh';
}
?>
Oh yeah, and feel free to leave my domain name in there if you copy paste it! Thanks! Love ya! Mean it!
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