Back in the early days of SEO, footer links were the ultimate ranking hack. You built a website, slapped a “Web Design by XYZ” or “Powered by” link at the very bottom, and watched the rankings climb as that single link multiplied across hundreds of pages.
Fast forward to today, and anyone buying an aged domain often inherits a messy footer full of these old partnerships, supplier nods, or developer credits. The big question is whether Google actually counts these legacy links anymore, or if the algorithm just ignores them entirely.
Here is a breakdown of how search engines treat old footer links today and what you should do with them.
The Shift from Editorial to Boilerplate
To understand how Google treats footer links right now, we have to look back at the Penguin algorithm updates that rolled out between 2016 and 2018. During this period, Google got incredibly good at spotting scalable link schemes.
Because footer links appear on every single page of a website—making them sitewide links—they are incredibly easy to scale. If an agency built 500 websites and put their link in the footer of every single one, that’s thousands of backlinks generated with zero editorial effort. Google caught on to this pattern quickly.
Search engines learned to categorize footers, headers, and sidebars as “boilerplate” content. This means the algorithm views links placed in these areas as structural architecture, not genuine editorial endorsements. A link embedded inside a highly relevant, well-researched blog post carries massive weight. A link stuffed down by the copyright notice barely registers.
What Happens to Legacy Links on Aged Domains?
So, you just picked up a premium aged domain. You scroll down and find links pointing to the previous owner’s web designer, a local hosting company, or some business partner from 2014. Are they passing any authority?
Technically, those links are live and search crawlers still follow them. But Google likely assigns them a value close to zero. The algorithm recognizes that these are historical artifacts of the site’s previous architecture. They aren’t going to trigger a manual penalty just for existing, but they certainly aren’t pushing those target sites up the search results. They are treated purely as structural remnants.
How to Handle Old Footer Links
When you take over an aged domain, you have a decision to make about that inherited footer baggage. You generally have two clear paths:
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Leave them as-is: If there are just one or two harmless links, leaving them won’t actively hurt your site. The SEO cost to you is non-existent, even if the benefit to the target site is minimal.
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Scrub them entirely: This is what most seasoned domain investors do. Deleting old, irrelevant footer links cleans up your outbound link profile. It removes any risk of looking like you inherited a private blog network (PBN) or a shady link scheme, giving you a totally clean slate to work with.
Building a Modern Link Strategy
If you are thinking about adding new footer links to your aged domain to pass authority to another site you own, you should reconsider your strategy.
The exact same discount rules apply to new links as they do to old ones. Google treats newly added footer links as the same old boilerplate content. They might crawl the link to discover the target page, but they will not treat it as a topical vote of confidence.
Trying to build an entire SEO campaign around sitewide footer placements is largely a waste of time in the modern search environment. If you want to leverage an aged domain to pass real authority, you need to focus on contextual, in-content links that naturally fit the topic of the page.
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