Page 2 - The Evil of SiteWide Links Test

sweet.. so I can bring down my copetitors sites by mass linking to them!

I personally think that a sitewide link has no positive affect on a site. As far as a negative effect, I dont know if that is possible, I have seen sites with tons of sitewides rank well. There are just two many factors that come into play. ( I used to get sidewides but no longer) Honestly if you hade a site with 2000 pages of original content and another site was being linked to from that content dont you think that your site would not be penalized for that? When we look at sitewides, its usually in some templated part of site. header, footer, left nav etc. It easy to detect because of the same link text being used.

Maybe a good way to test this would be to have a sitewide vs a sitewide that goes to a link out page (within the same domain) which can also act as a counter...

If you were to put a 10 second redirect on that link out page...that would kill any PR passing right?

I read another post at wmw that indicated they thought that a sitewide would only give credit for one link...not all of them. If a site wide does have a negative effect, it would give far to much leverage to scrapers, which I have already noticed in G get more listing than my domain....

at least it's listed.....I just wish it weren't through a frigen scraper

OK, here is my thinking about links.

There is a couple of links that Google (and other SE's using back links to determine the importance of the pages) can disregard or down it's importance.

Reciprocal links
This has been known for a very long time since the 2004 SES in London. It also makes allot of sense cause if 2 websites link to one another it means there has been a decision between the two sites to share links.

Site wide links
I believe that this can be regarded as the same. As far as relevance is concerned. These links are either bought or there is a relationship between the two sites. Therefore have lost allot of benefit but doesn't penalise.

Triciprical links
We also now know that SE's have the technology to track back links a bit further and actually figure out relationships between different sites even if these sites do not link directly with one another. SES 2005

I would say the best back links at this stage is back links from the content of other websites. There is also other back links from blogs etc. which I feel is still very much relevant. I just feel that I would like to open the above issues in this discussion.

I would much rather believe that the sit ewide back links doesn't count as much as before, instead of them actually damaging your site. However, Broker Boy, it seems like your testing says that by removing these site wide links and not replacing them with better back links you actually saw an improvement?

If this is the case, Google and others need to do some serious fixing very soon!

Chatmaster your synopsis is correct.

Many thanks,

Simon

Glengara none of the sites link to one another involved in the test. They all use different seo techniques and a differing set of links.

So if the sitewide bl's are actually damaging your site, then the SE's have screwed up. Now that is truely exciting news for every Blackhat out there. The world is yours for the taking!

Did anybody else have the same experience though? Before I make changes to my sites I need aditional confirmation to this. In my opinion Broker Boy has never made a mistake in his findings and I rate his opinion very high. However this is a very big step to take.

In this thread we have mentioned on a number of occasions that there is a possibility of linking with sitewides to a competitor's site could damage their ranking... This is not definite.. but when looking at Broker Boy's theory, should it be true, it could be a possibility..

I would like to know what the BH's think about this...Are you guys aware of it or have you maybe tested it and have a conclusion to this thread?

I would love to hear the thoughts of the BH world on this matter of sitewide linking.

BB, when you do a "similar pages" search on sites 2-5 do any of your sites turn up in the results?

While I would hope that the spiders wouldn't penalize for something you can't control I will not say it is impossible.

Is there anyone out there w/ the necessary resources willing to do more testing on this?

http://search.yahoo.com/search?ei=utf-8&fr=slv1-&p=personal+injury
http://search.msn.com/results.aspx?q=personal+injury&FORM=MSNH&srch_type=0

You are right in Google But Totally Incorrect in Yahoo and MSN they seem to thrive on sitewide links hidden sitewide links. Proof is in the pudden...Take a look at the freeweb site oin both searches just this one search I have hundreds on seaches with top searches due to sitewide links most hidden in the counter etc...I will say MSN is getting better. Yahoo they are completely being taken over by Spam if you can't see it you aren't really looking....

[QUOTE=Broker boy]Ok,

Who ever believes that sitewide links wont tank your site are very much incorrect.

Even 100% on topic themed links will tank your site - not only in google but also in msn and in yahoo.

QUOTE]

Hi Lyle congrats on your 100th post!

Yes we all know that the SE's often miss out on these issues!

Thank alot Chatmaster. it took me a while to get there. I really learned alot from the posts and replies on this forum.

We have over 250k pages on a directory and have sitewide links - seems to be fine to us.

In one of the nitches I target, just about every site on the top 10 has site-wides from multiple sources pointing to them.

If new sites are going to be penalized for this, how are they ever going to compete with the older sites that already have 100K site-wides pointing to them, dozens showing up even with a google "link:" check? Unless the importance of backlinks is drastically reduced, the top sites for many searches will effectively be set-in-stone, since it seems older sites have no problem cutting corners that new sites get penalized for.

Large, established sites can sink any competitor they see gaining on them by simply linking to them (or paying someone else to do it).

Like anything else regarding links - its about the source where they are coming from.

I doubt very much G would penalise a site for having links from hundreds of pages from a established site.