{"id":2549,"date":"2026-09-25T18:37:47","date_gmt":"2026-09-25T11:37:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/rexusdomain.com\/blog\/?p=2549"},"modified":"2026-09-22T18:41:56","modified_gmt":"2026-09-22T11:41:56","slug":"are-footer-links-on-aged-domains-still-counted-by-google","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/rexusdomain.com\/blog\/are-footer-links-on-aged-domains-still-counted-by-google\/","title":{"rendered":"Are Footer Links on Aged Domains Still Counted by Google?"},"content":{"rendered":"
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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.<\/div>\n
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.<\/div>\n
Here is a breakdown of how search engines treat old footer links today and what you should do with them.<\/div>\n

The Shift from Editorial to Boilerplate<\/h2>\n
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.<\/div>\n
Because footer links appear on every single page of a website\u2014making them sitewide links\u2014they 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.<\/div>\n
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.<\/div>\n

What Happens to Legacy Links on Aged Domains?<\/h2>\n
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?<\/div>\n
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.<\/div>\n

How to Handle Old Footer Links<\/h2>\n
When you take over an aged domain, you have a decision to make about that inherited footer baggage. You generally have two clear paths:<\/div>\n