Open For Discussion: Site Wide Links: Do They Help or Hurt?

[rustybrick]

Mod Note: This was from http://forums.seroundtable.com/showthread.php?t=713 where moderators first discussed the topic and then be branched it out to the general members.

Apprentice (has over 300 posts), Gabs, asks the next question.

The good old topic of Sidewide links..


I need to know if it worth requesting webmasters to remove a sidewide footer links to my sites ?

To answer this question, I think it would be cool to break it down.

By search engine...

Do site wide links help for Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com?

Future & Present issues?

Usability side of things?

Etc.

[randfish]

There are lots of times sitewide links are appropriate - in the footer of websites sharing a parent company, when permanent navigation falls across multiple domains, or in blogrolls, which commonly appear on every page of a blog.

I'm not sure about value to the particular search engines, but I would say that all three either do or will take a hard look at sites whose links come primarily from sitewides. In any indsutry or sector, there's going to be certain flags that different types of links can send up - sitewides are certainly one that can do that.

In terms of link value, it's my general belief that with a few notable exceptions (Wikipedia, Yahoo!, MSNBC, possibly DMOZ), the value of 5-10 links is near the maximum value you can get in terms of rank-boosting power ("Google Juice"). Moving up to 100 or 1000 links probably will not significantly impact your site's rank, IMO.

As for requesting a webmaster to actually remove the sitewides... I'd first think about value and intent. If the goal was to gain rankings and the links never get relevant clicks, removing them in favor of a content sector link in the body of an on-topic page might be positive in the long run. However, if you're getting clicks from lots of different pages, I wouldn't worry that a sitewide is adversely affecting your rank - if you're really concerned, you can ask that the links be "nofollowed" except on the page(s) you think will most benefit SEs.

[dazzlindonna]

I've never come across a case where sitewides HURT. They may not help much in some instances, but so far, I haven't experienced a reason to actually remove any. Having said that, and with the understanding that I have not run extensive tests, I'll say that it seems as though sitewides help a lot with MSN, some with Yahoo, little with Google. No idea about Ask.

It is certainly possible that someone, somewhere, has encountered a situation where sitewides hurt, but I haven't personally come across that. If you are planning to pay big bucks for a sitewide in the hopes that it will shoot your rankings up in Google, put your wallet back in your pocket. But if it's free or cheap, and you want some help with MSN or Yahoo, sure, why not?

I have sitewides on a few of my sites, with links directed at other sites. Have never seen any harm come from them.

[Phoenix]

I have dabbled in site wide links for sometime. More so early on in the days of SEO, when they actually did work very well. You used to be able to buy a site wide link and rank substanially high in a very short about of time. Besides the obvious exceptions that Rand mentions above, as for use in SEO, the impact is very little in my opinion right now. I have no reservations so to say about obtaining site wide links but again I don't place a lot of value on them to contribute to the increased chance of ranking improvements in the search engines.

Generally, Google seems to have caught on to the site wide linking approach earlier on then most engines. Yahoo is a bit slow, and MSN is even slower, and in Ask they seem to have no effect in my experience. There has been a bountiful amount of discussion on this in the past. Effectively I would count a site wide link on an entire site as one large link. The best approach I think is rather instead of a site wide link a webmaster should approach a website by targeting individual pages and taking a slower more covert approach to obtaining links. I don't mean hide links, but do your linking in a way that appears more natural. Place links here and there. This would thus make it more difficult to determine patterns in your approach.

Another topic about this type of linking is the estimated value (ROI) acheived from a site wide link. Back in the day (or even yesterday) site wide links were sold for MORE money than an individual link. Which at the time made sense. More links = more money. What happened to a lot of people was that as site wides were no longer effective as they once were, people were losing money on paying for these types of links. So in essence, site wide links were a bad investment, and still are if you plan to pay for them with $$$.

So will site wide links hurt your rankings? No not necessarily, unless of course the website is tagged for selling links/pagerank. I have seen some cases recently of large websites being penalized for selling massive amounts of text links and ads all over their websites. The former Mansion now become a crack house. Essentially they got too happy with trying to make money from the website. Now, the site that with links on said website, suffered to a little bit. They weren't penalized, but they had a more difficult time ranking for their particular phrases. Once the paid links were removed from the penalized site, there rankings went back to normal positions. I believe though cases like that are very isolated. And maybe have roots to a hand penalization or an entry in Matt Cutt's little black book of bad websites.

[rustybrick]

Excellent information. I would also like to point to a thread I covered at Cre8asite Forums.

Where Ammon says; "Site-wide links seem far more likely to be ignored or down-valued. I'm basing that on what I have seen generally, rather than on a specific empirical test."

Some good information in the thread also.

I'll most likely open this thread up tomorrow for general discussion...

Really good info...

[Darrin Ward]

Hummm, love this topic, because it's all theory.

In my experience, a sitewide link will generally only produce the same results if there were only a couple of links, because I thin SE's understand that only 1 few links are needed.

If there are sitewide links on many different sites, all with the same or similar anchor text, then there might be filter that might get tripped.

[gabs]

Generally, Google seems to have caught on to the site wide linking approach earlier on then most engines. Yahoo is a bit slow, and MSN is even slower, and in Ask they seem to have no effect in my experience. There has been a bountiful amount of discussion on this in the past. Effectively I would count a site wide link on an entire site as one large link.

One large link.. In theory I totaly agree...

In terms of link value, it's my general belief that with a few notable exceptions (Wikipedia, Yahoo!, MSNBC, possibly DMOZ), the value of 5-10 links is near the maximum value you can get in terms of rank-boosting power ("Google Juice").

I almost feel its 0-10 but proving that is a problem..

I wouldn't worry that a sitewide is adversely affecting your rank - if you're really concerned, you can ask that the links be "nofollowed" except on the page(s) you think will most benefit SEs.

If google did choose say 10 links from a site wide would it choose the best.. I'm pretty sure it would select a medium link and pass the medium juice.. nofollow would be a solution...


The topic of PR and sitewide ..
well PR value (which means nothing to do serps) but would suggest the a sitewide may counting in serps.
I'm seeing only a few sitewides out and about that pass PR that have been linked up in the last 6-8months..
(this is what I’ve seen, please disagree)

[ScottFish]

I am still not a fan of sitewide links unless they have a reason.

Blogs, Ok, thats the nature of blogs.
Large Networks (Cnet, etc), They're big enough not to impact rankings.

Smaller sites, I'd be very careful.

I look at this a little different than most people... Here's why...
Age is a major factor to google, we see this with the wildly contested sandbox. Another factor is size. If you search for a keyword and take the top 10 sites and look at their age and then also look at the number of backlinks that they have, you should see a good even distribution regarding both factors. I see any new site that gains a ton of backlinks from sitewides as being disruptful to that distribution and thus gets flagged.

That being said, if you launch a new site and gain sitewide links all in one swoop because of the authoritative nature of your site, then those links would be warranted and could trump the age/quanity factors.

[admans]

Sitewide Links in general help a little to gain PR but I would not go for more sitewides when I would be getting good single page PR links. Small sites having sitewides wouldnt help much IMHO.

Regards,

Admans.

[Jichino]

From my experience with sitewides, it doesn't hurt your website at all. Mainly because it is only counted as one link to search engines and the strongest link will be that link to be counted.