Footer link back to developer's site

[LHorton]

Hi all,

Just wondered what peoples thoughts are on this....

A company we have used to build and maintain a website for us is refusing to remove a footer link back to their site. The link says "Built by ......." and is situated at the bottom of every page.

They say they would lose valuable inquiry and SEO benefits and that that they will only remove the link if I pay a monthly fee to compensate for this.

During the quotation/development stage the link was not mentioned and it was certainly not stipulated that it must stay for their quote to be valid. Surely, it is my site and they would need my permission to include a link.

From a SEO point of view, isn't Google's stance that site wide footer links to external sites is frowned upon and is seen as an unnatural link that violates Google's guidelines

After corresponding with the director of this company, I would certainly not recommend them to anyone and would want the link removing for this reason alone (the developer was great to deal with - it's just the owner that is impossible to work with).

Regards
Lee

[jont]

Lee - I have sent you an email.

PS - I am not the developer in question

[LHorton]

Hi John

Thanks for your very kind offer.

Some additional information...

Unfortunately, we don't have ftp access to the site. It is hosted by the same company that built it for us. To make any changes we have to ask them to do it.

We paid a flat fee for the site and there was no mention of a back-link in their pricing structure or quote or any other correspondence; pointing this out to them they said

"It's not something that we overtly point out to anyone but we also never hide it".

Their portfolio has sites with and without the footer link - they say the sites without the link were much more expensive sites.

The site in question isn't our SellerDeck site, it’s an HTML coded site, and the company that coded it for us aren’t on this forum, nor do they do SellerDeck.

Pity we didn't picked someone from this forum to do the coding for us. We have had so much great help with our SellerDeck site over the years – it just didn't occur to me to look here for non-SellerDeck work.

Oh well, lesson learnt…

Lee

[Mike Hughes]

1. When you contract someone to do some work for you the 'who owns what' can be complicated but you should at the very least have full rights to use and modify the resulting work. If you haven't agreed for the link to be in place then you are within your rights to ask for it to be removed. You should check any 'standard terms and conditions' you might have agreed to but if you weren't supplied a copy at the time then they might not be valid anyway.

2. Clearly you're unhappy with them so you either need to find a way of working together or make a break. How you do this will depend on the agreement you have in place.

3. Personally I think life is too short to put up with nonsense from others so I would check whatever agreement is in and terminate it at the earliest opportunity. I'd then use someone I could trust. There are plenty of good developers on the forum that I'd be happy to trust my site with.

Mike