What are Footprints?

You hear about them a lot, but you may not be familiar with what your friends are. When you talk about Internet marketing, we refer to footprints as common lines of text that appear within all the pages of a particular category.

For example, if you want to scrape WordPress sites, you can use the footprints: “powered by WordPress”. Throw “powered by WordPress” and a few keywords into Google or Scrapebox and you will have thousands of WordPress sites in a particular category.

This article is not about scraping websites, though. In this article, we will explain the importance of eliminating footprints in your backlinking profiles.

Having easy to find footprints throughout your backlink profile is a dangerous place to be. Having common footprints across her backlinks is very unnatural and can be penalized by Google. If you are lucky enough to avoid a penalty, you’re still giving your competitors an easy way to find your backlinks and potentially rip them off.

Footprints are a very broad term. As we said above, they can be made of any line of text. This includes user names, e-mail addresses, titles, headers, and body content and anything else that can be searched for in a search engine.

When you are creating sites and backlinks, make sure that you eliminate every possible footprint  that you can. You do not want there to be any way to connect your sites and pages together. When you create Web 2.0’s, use different names and e-mail addresses for each. Use a different personal bio and images. That’s right, images can also be used to connect your pages together. The same can be said about videos as well.

You will also want to vary outgoing links within your backlinks. If you have all of your web 2.0 backlinks pointing to specific sites, it will make it easy for someone to find your entire blog network.

Speaking of blog networks, footprints are a common way in which they go down. Even the most secret networks are not immune to footprint tracing. If a network of blogs are consistently linking to the same websites, all you have to do to discover the entire network is take a few of the sites and filter out the uncommon backlinks. If you do that, you should be left with the entire list of the “top secret” blog network.

You really want to be careful about leaving footprints behind. It doesn’t matter how well your backlink strategy is, if you leave an easy way for Google to figure it out, you will do a lot of damage to your site. When you are creating backlinks, the goal will always be to mimic a natural link profile. Ane of the many things you will need to do in order to accomplish this is to eliminate and avoid any common footprints.