It’s important that web designers be able to credit themselves by adding a footer link to a website in the footer, but with the recent Google algorithm changes, having your link on every page of the site is actually a negative ranking factor with regard to SEO. You’re much better off with an internal page with a blurb and a link within the content or with a single link on the homepage in the footer.
For most clients, and in most situations, adding the footer credit link is much easier, and clients will seldom mind its addition there, especially if it’s only located on a single page of their site.
Change Your Footer Link to Show Only on the Homepage
In your footer.php file within the active WordPress theme you’ll want to add this bit of code where you’d like the link to appear:
<?php if (is_front_page()) { ?>
<a href="https://wordpress.org">Anchor Text Here</a>
<?php } ?>The code above should work for any given theme. It’s better than this code, which may not work on some advanced themes, but does generally work fine:
<?php if (is_home()) { ?>
<a href="http://www.websitewhatever.com">Anchor Text Here</a>
<?php } ?>Now, as a side note, you can add non-link text within the code as well such as:
<?php if (is_front_page()) { ?>
Some other non anchor footer text <a href="http://www.websitewhatever.com">Anchor Text Here</a>
<?php } ?>For some themes, the footer.php file may not actually be where you need to add this code. Most themes have something in the footer, however, such as a copyright. You can use Textwrangler or Notepad++ to do a multifile search and look for the copyright code. Then you will have found the correct footer file.
We’ve changed the footer.php files on all of our client sites to only show on the homepage and our link profiles look much more natural. We highly advise using the above code to make your WordPress footer credit link appear only on the homepage.
