Should we remove or nofollow site-wide footer links?

Selected answers from the Dumb SEO Questions Facebook & G+ community.

• 
  Warren Chandler: Too many unnatural links?
  Here's a question that seems to get a variety of different answers from SEOs of late. Hope you can clarify this for the community.
  
  In days of old webmasters would often add 'Website by XYZ Company' in the footer of their client projects which provided a great incoming link or links.
  
  What should you do with these links today? It's possible of course that the site could have thousands of pages and posts which generates the same number of incoming links, all with identical anchor text.
  
  Should these be removed? Should the link simply be changed to a 'nofollow' link? Would it be better to vary this from site to site and only have the link showing on the homepage itself to avoid duplication?
  
  I'm extremely interested in your answers and how you've measured such results through any of your own experiences. Thank you.
• 
  Simon Fryer: Hey +Warren Chandler ;we've covered this question quite a few times in the community.
  
  My agency delivers a lot of web builds, and this a strategy we use for our own linkbuilding - the added benefit is that if we run SEO for the client, all the backlinks (eventually) benefit us. ;
  
  Having sitewide links (on every page) in the footer isn't advisable anymore. As you've mentioned your best bet is to place the link on the homepage only. Don't be afraid to optimise the anchor text if you think your backlink profile is varied enough. If you're not sure, stick to branded anchor text. Don't nofollow the link - it's not necessary and you would just be wasting good link equity. ;
  
  RE: measuring results - I think +Tim Capper ;has experience with optimised sitewides from one website only causing what we thought was a penguin penalty. In contrast, my company has optimised sitewides on quite a few websites with no problem whatesoever. The impact will depend on what % of total backlinks these links represent. ;
  
  Safemode: place them on the homepage only with branded anchor text. ;
  
  Hope this helps!
• 
  Tim Capper: Correct +Simon Fryer ;i had the experince of seeing an agency change their usual : Site by xyz
  
  To a blatant optimised footer  ;: xyz web design in Town.  ;
  
  The may Penguin roll out hit the agency in a very granular way - it dropped rankings for the optimised text.
  
  Also Google has this to say : JM suggested that these are not editiorially placed by the owner, the designers just add them in, so they terefore should be nofollowed.
  
  However i white label for some agencies who keep them very clean and do not deviate from site by xyz.
  
  They have not had so much as a penguin tickle.
  
  As Google moves down the road  ;/ list of links they may in time turn their attention to these, but at the moment (if kept acceptable) seem to be fine.
• 
  Simon Fryer: Thanks +Tim Capper.
  
  I'd also like to play devil's advocate a little :)
  
  We used to build quite a few sites & carry out fixes on Opencart. At one point in late 2011 I decided during a  ;build that we would use the anchor text "Opencart experts" sitewide in the footer. It's a pretty low competition/volume search term, but the traffic would be quite qualified. ;
  
  This was back in 2011. To this day we still rank 6th nationally in Google for "Opencart Experts" as far as I can tell,  ;despite the only mention of "opencart experts" being from about 6k sitewides on one site. It's also worth mentioning that we gained some major ground during the May 22nd Penguin 2.0 update. ;
  
  Again i'd reiterate, it's about what % in total it contributes to your backlinks (for now). ;
  
  I'm not saying that this is a sensible strategy, and wouldn't recommend doing it, but this is one example of something slipping through the net. I'm going to leave them up as a test to see when we get a slap for it. ;
• 
  Warren Chandler: Thank you +Simon Fryer ;and +Tim Capper ;for your responses. ;
  
  I'm certainly with both of you with regards to what's supposedly the best way to do things these days, but my data doesn't seem to fit with what SEOs are saying.
  
  The confusion I have is that I run a site that has tens of thousands of pages each containing a consistent footer that points to about a dozen of my clients sites, all links being dofollow.
  
  Many of these sites rank on page one of Google for the exact anchor text keyphrase in the footer (via incognito searches), and there only seems to be one that doesn't rank as well for the same respective anchor text.
  
  This obviously tells me that these links aren't doing harm - it's almost indicating the opposite.  ;
  
  Surely if I can be ranked #1 on Google for a fairly competitive search term (where the competition is 12 million pages), these links must actually be doing some good?
  
  Hopefully now you can see my confusion.  ;
   ;
• 
  Simon Fryer: Now we're getting down to the fat +Warren Chandler ;; reading between the lines of what Google say, what they do, and what they say to make us change what we do. ;
  
  Couple of factors to take in to account in your case: Is the one that "doesn't rank well" showing up on page 3+? If so it could well be an algorithmic penalty. If it's on the first few pages it might just be that the search term is more competitive than the others (not necessarily in terms of quantity of searches, but the quality of the other results). ;
  
  Using sitewide, optimised anchor text clearly doesn't mean a de facto penalty - it can still provide significant benefits. However, at certain thresholds it can get you in trouble. For the sake of future-proofing things this is why it's not best practice. ;
• 
  Warren Chandler: +Simon Fryer ; Yes, the one that isn't getting the SERP love is hovering around page 3-4 of the rankings, but the site needs restructuring too which doesn't help.  ;It was extremely keyword stuffed the last time I checked.
  
  I guess I'm none the wiser with what works and what doesn't, but you're right - there's nothing to say that these sites won't get hit HARD in the future.
  
  Thanks again for the responses.