Site-wide links can hurt your rankings

06 May

Posted by Google Success as Google Ranking Tips, SEO Tips

If a site links to another site from every page, those links are called site-wide links. If you are buying links, it may look as a good option to receive hundreds of incoming backlinks for the price of one link, however, most search engines would count only the most powerful link which is relevant. Site-wide links also make your link profile to look artificial, as you’d have hundreds of incoming links with the sama anchor text. Many SEO forums have reported that side-wide links can actually hurt your ranking in search engines like Google, especially when site-wide links constitute a large percentage of the incoming links.

If most of your link popularity comes from purchased site-wide links, Google will eventually find and eliminate the value of these links. So it is advisable to buy few single links that would fly under the radar.

However, it makes me wonder how Google treats blogroll links. Most blogroll links, by default, are site-wide links - Going by the logic of anchor text, it would mean that it is better not to receive blogroll links from huge blogs having hundreds of pages.

Technorati Tags: site-wide links, backlinks, SEO, ranking, Google, link popularity, Google

8 Responses

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.
Mustafa

May 24th, 2008 at 6:27 pm
2

Thanks for the article friend.
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.
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 ?
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.
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.
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.
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