Matt Cutts On Sitewide Links

[DarrenHaye]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mTjN9x-by-I

Didn't really go into as much detail as I would have been interested to know.. not very much detail at all.

[Dr.Marie]

Interesting video!

I have seen a bunch of people who are running around madly disavowing links simply because they are sitewide. When they're sitewide, backlink tools are going to show you that there are potentially hundreds of links from one site and because people are paranoid about Penguin they don't want to see 200 links all with the same anchor text coming from one site. I'm going to use this video to point out that just because a link is sitewide doesn't mean it is bad.

In my mind though it all comes down to intent to manipulate. If I get a bunch of sitewide links on multiple websites all containing my main keyword and pointing to my home page then that's not good.

But if someone decides to put me on their blogroll I'm not going to go around screaming about negative SEO.