An old topic of web design by or site credit links - should you put them on web sites and if so, should they pass link juice?
So if I design a web site for you, can I put "site designed by Barry" and link that to my site? Trust me, you see this on probably 25% of the sites designed out there by smaller agencies.
Google's John Mueller said you can put the link but "definitely put a nofollow rule for those links." That is even if the site owner wants the link there, you should still nofollow it.
Here is the transcript of the video where it starts at 19:47:
Question:
I work at a web design agency and we place a “designed by link” in the footer of all the web sites we create. Is this a good practice or should we stop?
Answer:
I guess this kind of looks at things like with regards to unnatural links, for example.And from our point of view, these kind of links, by default, are things where the webmaster doesn't really place the link explicitly on their own.
So this is something where I'd recommend, if you want to put your footer link there, make sure it has a nofollow link there, so that this is something that people could click on if they're interested, but it's seen as something that is not an editorial link by the webmaster. It's not something that you'd have to worry about later on and say, "oh, my god. I put all these links on this website. Now Google will think I'm building an unnatural link pyramid or something crazy."
So this is something where putting a nofollow there is definitely good practice. You don't need to kind of not put these links there if you think that it makes sense. If that's something that you've kind of decided on together with the people who are running this website in the end, then that's something, certainly that you might want to do, but I definitely put a nofollow rule for those links.
Here is the video:
Jennifer Slegg first covered this and now there is some discussion at WebmasterWorld on the topic.
Personally, my company stopped doing this practice well before Google had the nofollow because I figured most larger agencies didn't put this on sites they created. It looked a bit cheap.
Forum discussion at WebmasterWorld & Google+.
