30 Responses

1. Home Business Blog

   May 18th, 2008 at 4:53 pm

   1

   Thanks for bringing up this topic. In my opinion, aitewide 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. That is because more sitewide links affect the ranking drastically.

2. Mustafa

   May 24th, 2008 at 6:27 pm

   2

   Thanks for the article friend.

3. Arlo Gilbert

   May 24th, 2008 at 11:12 pm

   3

   Thanks for this advice. Like me and other people think that lots of Links can help to boost your SEO Campaign. But because of this post i am aware of the exact process.

4. Harold

   June 16th, 2008 at 4:30 pm

   4

   It’s a good question and I think not one easily answered. I think you’re making a mistake by looking at the “number of links”. You mentioned something else which touches a more important topic: it’s not the exact quantity that counts but the “footprint”.

   If all your links are from blogrolls, then how did your link get there. If at the same time you have a blog, which has links out to all the other bloggers than it is likely to assume you’re part of a network. Say political bloggers. If.. that’s the case, then how much value can you assign to a posting within that network ? If it’s not the case then.. did you buy these blogroll listings ?

   If you all your links are not from blogrolls, but some are, and they’re good blogs, and some of your postings link out to other good blogs etc etc.. then I don’t see any reason why a blogroll listing would not count. Probably more than an occasional posting since postings get archived and are not crawled that frequently (see how I refer to crawl frequency and not pagerank or something else).

   So it all boils down to: what would be a typical footprint *for your site* to have and does it in any way look “weird”. I believe Google looks at it much more in this way than in the “topicality”, “relevance”, “number of links”, “sitewide links” etc etc.. it’s all really very very relative.

   It’s funny I was actually looking for an answer to this same question myself, and I just realize the knowledge was all the time inside me

   Cool eh ?

5. Google Success

   June 16th, 2008 at 10:10 pm

   5

   Hi Harold, Thanks for your comments and stopping by. Yes, I agree with you. As long as your link profile looks natural, a few sitewide links should not be a problem. This blog also has some incoming sitewide links, and some of them are not in my control. In most cases we can not control who links to our site unless we bought those links.

6. Mick Kopp | Success Secrets

   June 19th, 2008 at 4:04 am

   6

   Thanks for the great info. I was just about to go out and get some links.

7. SEO India

   June 21st, 2008 at 3:39 pm

   7

   Suppose if i have ten links on my blog ( with different anchor text ) on a single page and all of them pointing to my site, would I gain link value from all of them.

   Or will Google treat all of them equivalent to one link.

8. Google Success

   June 21st, 2008 at 5:22 pm

   8

   SEO India, Here is answer to your question.

   SEOmoz had already experimented with this and they found out that only the first link counts. Other links are ignored. You can try it yourself on a new domain to verify the fact.

   You can check the original post at SEOmoz here – Multiple links on same page

9. SEO India

   July 5th, 2008 at 9:30 pm

   9

   Thanks a lot for this info.

10. Phil

    August 5th, 2008 at 2:30 am

    10

    It is difficult to test, if sitewide links really hurt you. Most blogs have sitewide links and they don’t hurt.

11. Raaj Paatkar: Search Blogger of the Day | SEO Scoop

    August 14th, 2008 at 7:14 pm

    11

    [...] Meet Raaj Paatkar, the Search Blogger of the Day. Today I’d like to highlight a post called Site-wide Links Can Hurt Your Rankings. Raaj explains what sitewide links are, and then discusses the value of these links, going so far as to say that they can actually hurt your rankings. Do you agree? Have you tested the effects? Raaj also wonders about blogrolls, since these are often sitewide. Go read Raaj’s post, and then chime in with your thoughts about sitewide links and blogrolls. [...]

12. Scott McAndrew

    August 24th, 2008 at 4:13 am

    12

    The SEOMoz article (cited) seems like the best validation out there.

13. Online hry

    September 2nd, 2008 at 3:51 am

    13

    Great! Thank for article.

14. Misu Petre

    September 3rd, 2008 at 1:16 am

    14

    I have been reading a lot about this issue lately, some people say that they hurt some say that they do not hurt, some even say that they hurt in the short run but that in the long run they are great. One person even reported an increase in the page rank of one of his blog from 2 to page rank 4 after setting up some sitewide links from 7 other of his other blogs.

    Probably getting some sitewide links from some sites it is ok, but i think you should also get some single links from pages now and then. You should not rely solely on getting (probably paying) sitewide links from other websites.

15. Cell Phone Maven

    September 3rd, 2008 at 10:14 pm

    15

    Thanks! I was discussing this issue today.
    Maybe sitewides hep with PR – but I think it would not be logical to count them as if they are hundreds of unique links – its so obvious that its only one vote.

16. Ruben Zevallos Jr.

    September 26th, 2008 at 4:45 pm

    16

    I have lot’s of friends and readers that add to their blogs and web sites, links to my home page… you mean that Google’ll treat it as you said? So… may be my web site was penalized because of it?

17. Milwaukee Websites

    September 30th, 2008 at 11:10 am

    17

    What a fantastic discussion. I agree with Harold and also think that the quality of links is better than the quantity of links. There’s alot of conflicting information our there on this topic, but I do think that quality wins.

18. article writing tips

    September 30th, 2008 at 4:40 pm

    18

    If only one llink is counted, does the sdame principle apply to forum postings? So it doesn’t matter it there are a thousand posts pointing to one site or one post with one link?

19. alex

    October 14th, 2008 at 7:16 am

    19

    I have to agree, I have two sites a very established one with a good ranking and a new one. I was link building on the new site and someone in a related blog offered me a free link. Within two weeks of the link apearing I had dropped about 30 places and yahoo about 50. This guy thought he was being kind. I hope to god it goes back up again!

20. TheFreeSite.biz

    October 18th, 2008 at 11:29 pm

    20

    I think everyone is tip toeing around the whole issue. Are we that stupid to think that the king of linking (google) doesn’t know all the tricks? How do you think they got to be no#1 in the first place? Do you think it happened by chance. They are not stupid, they know what site wide linking is, and you can count on the fact that they will penalize sites and are doing so now, who do this. Are we that stupid to think that 5000 links from one site wouldn’t signal a flag? Why don’t SEOs call a spade a spade?
    Dave

21. stumped

    December 19th, 2008 at 5:09 am

    21

    if this all is true, then all you need to do is set up side wide links on link farms pointing to your competitors and they would be back on page 10? i find this really hard to believe. You have no control of links pointing to your site, how can you possibly be penalized for something beyond your control?

22. .SR

    January 6th, 2009 at 5:50 pm

    22

    Thanks for sharing this valuable article.

23. Joel McLaughlin

    March 3rd, 2009 at 3:59 pm

    23

    I have a #3 ranking for Professional Search Engine Optimization that was produced by site wide links, so far so good… I am wondering if this is simply a theory, because I am competing against the best of the best…

24. Everythings4Free.com

    April 20th, 2009 at 7:42 pm

    24

    Well if that were true I have another pr6 site with 17 pr5 inner pages. Hey, all i would need to do is add my link on every page and according to site wide linking I should get a pr5 or pr6, but in reality google just gives you possibly 1 to 3 links before a flag is raised. I’m just guessing but I know if i was working for google that is what I would allow. No one is really saying that you will get peanalized with pr lose. But google probably allows 1-3 links before the flag goes up. Why take chances with your pr? A few strong links maybe much better in the long run. It’s just like flying a war plane, sometimes its good to fly just under the radar if get my drift.

25. Andrew

    July 7th, 2009 at 11:09 am

    25

    A rubbish theory. Google has not announced anywhere that they discard the site wide links. A good example is this guys site “http://www.briangardner.com/” 99% of the links are site wide links. Backlinks from his wordpress designs.

26. Google Success

    July 7th, 2009 at 1:40 pm

    26

    Hi Andrew, the sitewide backlinks for briangardners can improve his pagerank but still he is not ranking for his keyword in the title ‘wordpress themes’. It is easy to rank for a keyword in the domain which is unique like ‘brian gardner’

27. Andrew

    July 14th, 2009 at 6:27 am

    27

    Obviously his site is not ranked for the keyword “wordpress themes”, because he doesn’t use that keyword. Please check his site and the keywords he uses.

28. UK Webmaster Forum

    August 7th, 2009 at 2:33 pm

    28

    Sitewide links can’t HURT, rather they may not help much in some instances. I don’t place a lot of value on them to contribute to the increased chance of ranking improvements in the search engines.
    A sitewide link will generally only produce the same results if there were on a couple of links and if there are on many different sites, all with the same or similar anchor text, then there might be filter that might get tripped.
    So getting a minimal of it is the key, thanks for the post!

29. Shumail

    January 12th, 2010 at 3:25 pm

    29

    Well i believe it doesnt hurt but may be it gives u a very less amount of benefit..

30. Jonathan

    January 15th, 2010 at 11:37 pm

    30

    hmmm interesting post. But from my experience i must to agree, there are a penalty, for site wide-links and for using the same keyword on 3-4 big sites for sure a site with PR4-5 go re-sandboxed.