In your attempts to have your site optimized for high search engine rankings, if all you do to create back-links is get footer links from other sites you may be sadly disappointed to find out that Google Pagerank and other search engine ranking systems may not view these as strong back-links.  Will footer links cut it? In a video answer from Google, they note that while it may not be of major concern right now with regard to pagerank, they do reserve the right to have footer based back-links not weigh as heavily, editorially,  in search engine rankings!  What does this mean for you?  If you produce websites and your only referral back-link out of the deal comes from a footer, you may want to give more careful thought now to what you will do differently to ensure your ranking with search engines.  When it comes to SEO (Search Engine Optimization) and especially when it comes to Google, changing our methods should be a swift response to the rapid changes we can expect to come.  While an in-depth study comparing the ranking methods of both Google & Bing show a dramatic difference in methods, it also acknowledges an apparent shift from Bing to follow similar ranking methods as Google: “Bing seems to be moving much closer to Google over time.”

Call to Action: One suggestion for changing linking methods is to advocate a “sponsor’s page” or something to that effect so that main article links are also provided to you.  This will also provide the opportunity for you to create a ‘profile’ or description of your business without the negative impression associated with traditional advertising.  Another suggestion is look for ways to include your social media links & posts on other sites; this may be very obvious but if you have already been given a sponsor’s spotlight page on another site, this will be an excellent place to also share your social media links.

Related Sources:

Are links in footers treated differently than paragraph links? by GoogleWebmasterHelp

“Well if you go back and read the original page rank paper they said that the links were distributed completely uniformly, page rank was distributed without any regard, whether the link was at the top of the page, the bottom of the page, in the footer, in the text all that sort of stuff. In general our link analysis continues to get more and more sophisticated to the point where, what we compute today is still called page rank and still bears resemblance to the original page rank but it’s much more sophisticated than the original page rank used to be. So we do reserve the right to treat links and footers a little differently. For example if something is in the footer, it might not carry the same editorial weight so someone might have setup a single link and that might be something across the entire site, whereas something that is in actual paragraph of text is a little more likely to be in the editorial link. So we do reserve the right to treat those links differently in terms of how we consider them for relevance how we consider them for reputation, how much we trust them and all those sorts of things.”

Google vs. Bing: Correlation Analysis of Ranking Elements by Jitendra Singh Jat of EBriks InfoTech