The Value of Site-Wide Links

An offline discussion with Fathom has led me to undertake a fair amount of research concerning whether site-wide linking is good, bad, or just not helpful. A discussion on the topic would be helpful here, too.

First, the definition. A site-wide link is a link that is carried on a template, so that each page within the domain carries the link. This could mean hundreds of links from one domain, if there are that many pages.

So far, this is what I've found:

1) As long as the page is relevant, the consensus is that site-wide links definitely do not hurt. There is disagreement on whether a site-wide link is better than one link from the main page.
2) If they do help, the degree to which they help is consistent with whether the page is cached, and the relative value of each page. Beyond the home page, many pages have zero importance, which means that many of the links have no value. However, if deep pages do indeed have importance, than those links are helpful.
3) Nobody knows for sure, as the SE's keep this part secret.

For me, this is important for a client with over 125,000 links. Those links are from 300-400 webmasters, each with dozens of pages. The 300-400 webmasters have relevant content, and have worthwhile page importance.

Please discuss.

I would disagree that sitewide cannot hurt - at least the way I would define "hurt".

If you take 2 identical sites and each gets links from the same 100 other sites, site A getting sitewides (say 500 links from each) and site B getting a single link from the home page or 2nd-level page, I'll bet you a week's earnings that site B out ranks site A in Google, even though site A gets 500x more backlinks.

Why? Trust. 100 new sitewides (or 50,000 new links from 100 sites) will trigger a trust filter. It will NOT look natural.

As for adding value, I haven't seen added value (over single links) from sitewides in over a year. A single sitewide is, from what I can see) about as valuable as a single home page link.

Brandall:

Trying to clarify, not being argumentative.

Why would a site-wide that is achieved because it in the CMS template be spammy? CMS templates have generated an enormous amount of web content, and are now the de-facto standard for user-generated content. Wordpress, typepad, blogger, live journal, mambo, nuke, drupal all have this aspect. I have to think that the search engines have learned to discern the difference by now. So, while I concede that the value of the additional links from within the domain may not be helpful, I have to think that -- if they do indeed hurt -- the SE's are way behind the times.

If I am successful getting on the links listings at Fark, Daily Kos, Instapundit, or Matt Cutts, I am going to get a site-wide whether I like it or not.

How about this. Would you swap links if you had no idea what page your link would land up on?
If Google is really starting to care about where an inbound link comes from (a la Cutts), there could be problems. If you take out sitewides on sites that are prone to scraping, your links could end up in the worst kind of neighbourhoods?
Thoughts?

The reason site wide links appear spammy is because they do not follow natural linking patterns.

What I mean by this is that natural linking as a web master thinking - oh, thats relevant I better put a link to that widget page from my widget page. This will be helpful for my readers.

It would be highly unlikely the web master would see it fit to put hte widget link on every single page of his site including the disclaimer and contact page etc.

Google knows that people sell site wide links in order to make more money from links. This is quite obviously artificial linking.

Its all about being trusted and appearing natural!

You need to remember "links to a website cannot harm a website"... links from a website can and do harm a website.

There are "right ways", "ok ways", "poor ways" and "down right bad ways" to link.

I teach this to merchants that don't know much about SEO - many people do not connect the dots and cannot see beyond the moment nor invest in historical knowledge...

CMS templates, i.e. blogger, typepad, wordpress, etc., are the most popular way to publish web pages. If I sell, for example, campaign T-shirts and hats, and I ask a political blogger to carry my link, my link will be site-wide because that site uses a CMS. (This is a real-world example, I am getting hundreds of links via 1 site-wide from the Impeach Bush Coalition Blog)

All pages that he writes carry the same template, and therefore carry my link. The link was not paid-for, it was done naturally, the content is relevant, and there was no black hat technique involved. However, because of the proliferation of CMS, your number of links will skyrocket because you get 1 site-wide. Would I ignore bloggers because they use CMS? No. But, according to some, having a link from a blog does harm because the linking pattern would appear unnatural.

My whole question revolves around whether the SE's take into account the nature of CMS and sitewides.

Yes it is... you seem not to want to accept the answers.

One more time: CAN YOU GET AWAY WITH IT?

Answer: YES.

However, Your premise is "I want PR" so I can advertise PR links and get cash... and that is a possibly.

However, if you think you can get 1, 5, 10, 20, 50, etc. websites linking to you with 1K, 5K, 10K, 20K, 50K of sitewide links and think you'll get and keep advertisers...

here what you will achieve http://www.bluefind.com/

Look at any/every page after the homepage?

PR0 - great for advertising right?

What you propose is what they did.

tstolber's answer is very good especially if you are talking about any kind of commerce where you have competitors. As is fathom's.

Put yourself in a competitor's or competitor seo's place. You are beating them in google with all the pr and anchor text score you get from those sitewide links. They complain to google via a spam report that you have those links just to improve your serp score.

Will the google tech agree? I'd bet they'd think this same statement:

"It would be highly unlikely the web master would see it fit to put hte widget link on every single page of his site including the disclaimer and contact page etc.

Google knows that people sell site wide links in order to make more money from links. This is quite obviously artificial linking. It would be highly unlikely the web master would see it fit to put hte widget link on every single page of his site including the disclaimer and contact page etc.

Google knows that people sell site wide links in order to make more money from links. This is quite obviously artificial linking."

Do you think you have competitors that would rat on you? If not then maybe you could risk it. But I would let a client know the risks as outlined here.

Again, the point is being missed. Your statement indicates that the webmaster makes a choice to put a link to you on every single page. This is not necessarily the case, if they are using a CMS. If a blogger uses Wordpress, the "Links" part of the template is on every page, including every new post. In fact, most bloggers don't think of themselves as webmasters. They might think, "hey, this is a cool site, I'll put it in my links section." This decision means that he just added a site-wide link when no such thing was purchased. Further, the decision was a natural one.

Tolber: I am not trying to game the linking system. My quandry is that I focused on adding links from bloggers because bloggers had relevant content to my product. What resulted was a few hundred links, obtained legitimately through natural methods without purchase. However, because the bloggers use Wordpress or blogger, I have received site-wide links. This makes it look as though I have added hundreds of thousands of links, when only a few hundred webmasters linked to me.

Actually it was tstolber's point. I was just agreeing with him.

As to missing points, here is mine again:

It matters what a google tech thinks. The google tech that reviews the spam report about your site from a competitor.

If the google tech thinks like you do "In fact, most bloggers don't think of themselves as webmasters. They might think, "hey, this is a cool site, I'll put it in my links section."

Then you are chilling and billing

So, I guess the question is... how does one determine what a Google webmaster would think? Is there a phone number, or any place to consult from Google itself. How do you know what sticks out as unnatural and what doesn't? Is it just the whim of whomever gets the spam report? Is it even touched manually?

It just seems that Google's position is "don't do anything to affect your link popularity" when everybody knows that sites don't just get found themselves. The oldest myth running is "just post good content and it will be found." That's a bunch of b.s.

In general, only experience.



You can do whatever you wish. You can acquire links where ever and however you wish... Google will or will not credit appropriately... and further you will likely never know 'which ones' are credited and which ones were a waste of time long after you acquired them.

I recall SEO-Guy getting PR10 links from phpBB a couple of years ago which should have had a pretty noticable increase.

They never did... money well spent?

It's totally up to you what, where, and how you risk.

I just thought I'd throw an additional perspective on sitewide links out there.

Many web designers add a sitewide link to the bottom of their client's web sites.

Many web apps (e.g. phpBB) have a sitewide return link.

We see great PR / SE results in both of these circumstances.

The key in my opinion is, as mentioned, how natural this is.

Another factor I believe is how many links to sub-pages and other single page links are out there. Diversity and consistent, natural growth have been the key for me.

I use a lot of sitewide links, and have generated many PR 6 and PR 5 web sites in under 4 months. It all depends on the situation.

Here's a situation I'm fretting with now. There are a lot of sitewide links pointing to my old business web site from client's web sites. I am moving to a new business name and domain name, and won't be 301'ing the old site for a while. I decided to update the links on client sites to my new, single page, temporary web site to begin fostering the identity out there. I'm hoping this doesn't bite me in the arse, but we'll see! I believe that with consistent new linkage and sub-page linkage when I launch the full site in the next week, it should be alright.

About the origianl post:

Sorry brandall but i think this type of links can hurt your website rankings and maybe be banned, i dont know about now but i had heard a case about this last year, i dont if this still apply to this days becuase of this past updates (big daddy and jagger), maybe this type of website are no penalize for this actions, but i certainly doubt it.

Templatemonster.com was banned for a month from google database for this action last year, they complaign about this saying that this is part of their service and in few days he was up again.