Hosting / SEO Company & Client Footer Links

Hello,

I started a hosting / SEO company some time ago. At the moment I have them all on two high-end dedicated servers.

The domain for the hosting company itself is also used as the nameservers for all of the clients below it.

Although the main hosting domain is on its own IP and all clients on either a largely shared IP or on their own IP's - Would linking from them to my own main hosting domain get me penalized? Given the main hosting domain is also the nameservers for those sites.

I have a large number of clients now that host with me, some are just hosting, some are high PR SEO clients who host with me also. I feel as though my main hosting domain is missing out on some link juice by not getting my footer links on my client sites - but I'm terrified of getting penalized ... or worse, my clients getting penalized in some way.

Any thoughts would be appreciated.

bummer

I would have thought if you have a legitimate reason to link it should be OK but I'm not sure.

Couldn't you register another domain and point the clients sites to that? You could build a real site / Blog and then use that to link to your main (hosted somewhere else) or you could just 301 redirect the whole domain to your main.

I think I'd build a small site though as it would look more natural and then slowly (not all at once) point your clients links to it.

As always do your own research / testing as it's the only way to be truely sure.

No, it shouldn't get you or your clients penalized at all. Most website designers put footer links on their clients sites and it only seems to help.

If all your clients are using the same server your ranking wont improve as much as you want. this is because these you are linking from will be from the same server, and this means will only represent 1 seo vote in total. If you however get links from different sites hosted in different servers this will cause the opposite effect.

There are two issues here:

A) Will it have a positive effect: yes it certainly will be of benefit links from a number of additional domains always helps with rankings, however the effect will be reduced as they are on on the same class-c IP address.

B) Should/Can you put your link on those domains: Perhaps not, the issue is that technically the client owns the domain/site content and you would need to gain permission to add a link back to your site (very white hat manor of looking at the situation). We do have links back from all our client and they help significantly in ranking.

-aReJay