You often read that links placed in sidebars or footers from irrelevant sites don’t hold much value. You also hear that reciprocal linking is useless. Guess what? They both still work and many SEO companies are putting their clients at risk.
Example: SummitDentalofLaMesa.com
If you scroll waaaaaay down to the bottom of their page (just below the fold, of course), you’ll notice quite a few suspicious, non-relevant links. This same link footer is placed on most of the other small businesses that they are linking to. If you want to do some real digging, you can even find out which SEO company is abusing their clients.
Granted, these aren’t very difficult keywords but most of the websites in this footer rank pretty well (I’m assuming their keyword is the anchor text in the footer). Not only does this provide no long term value to a client (because these links will likely disappear if they cancel), the company providing this “service” for them is putting them all at risk if Google should ever decide to drop a bomb on them.
Moral of the Story: Spammy links still work if you’re only interested in the short term. If you want to build and optimize for long term value, build a site people would want to link to and focus on higher quality link acquisition.
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