Take a look at most busi­ness web­sites and the chances are you’ll see a link at the bot­tom of the page that says “web­site design by some-web-design-company” and that the text links to that web design company’s site. As a web­site owner you might think that is rea­son­able — it com­pares to garages that put stick­ers with their name on in your new car, or the printer who has a credit at the back of a cat­a­logue — well yes and no.

Yes, if the web com­pany has asked per­mis­sion and fully explained the impli­ca­tions to their client (no typ­i­cal in my experience).

No, if the impli­ca­tions haven’t been explained. You see, most web­site own­ers might not be fully aware that the way search engines like Google con­vey ‘author­ity’ ie make a site rank well in searches is a com­bi­na­tion of fac­tors. One of these fac­tors (and still quite an impor­tant one today) is the num­ber of links point­ing to a site. So if said web com­pany has hun­dreds of links from their cus­tomers’ sites point­ing to their own site then they’ll ben­e­fit from it. You could argue that they are mate­ri­ally ben­e­fit­ing from it and that makes it a some­what dubi­ous thing if it is done in a ‘grey’ way.

Sim­i­larly, some web­sites have addi­tional text like “ecom­merce web­sites in a town” or “SEO by seo­com­pany” in addi­tion to the com­mon “web­site by” link. All of these are tak­ing away part of the author­ity of the host site and pass­ing it onto a third party. Not good.

So, if you’re a web­site owner, take a close look at what links you can see on your site and ask your­self — how are they ben­e­fit­ing you?

(P.S. Yes we do, but only occa­sion­ally and with the owner’s full informed agreement.)