8 replies to this topic

[excel30]

Hi,

I have seen the opportunity to buy either an index page link with a 10 word description on a related site to mine.

However, they also they offer site wide linking, whereby my link is on every page of there site. Although not in a prominent position and unlikely to get vistors as theres so much info on the pages my link would be barely noticeably.

Alot of the pages are indexed in google and have Pagerank.

Can sitewide linking get me into trouble with the search engines. The content is certainly relevant to my site.

The price for a sitewide link is only slightly more than the index page ad box.

[Randy]

Can sitewide linking get me into trouble with the search engines.

No, sitewide links won't get you into any sort of trouble. However there is some thought that the engines may be devaluing sitewide links, giving less weight. Almost to the point that you'll end up getting the same amount of link popularity from a single link as you would for 100 or 1,000 links from the same site.

There's no way to prove or disprove the theory. But it would make some sense.

If it were me, I would go with the single index page link. Not because of any sort of sitewide link issues, but because you said the link there will be more Prominent and more likely to be seen and clicked on by real people. I just don't see much value in the rest of the links if nobody is ever going to see or click on them.

[Jill]

If the links are just in the footer of the page, there's a good chance they won't count for much with Google, from what I understand. But they might give you lots of traffic (or not).

[myl]

site wides are absolutely not the way to go. If anything try to get them on half the pages but stay away from site wides, your shooting yourself in the foot.

if you want to do it properly get links on the home page and a few interior pages.

[Randy]

Be careful about making blanket statements unless you're willing to provide testing data and proof myl.

FTR, I wouldn't recommend site wide links in this case either. But it's not going to cause any harm. No more or less harm than getting links on half of the pages would.

[Seffy]

Don't bother with the sitewide links, their a total waste of time plus they could possibly harm you more than help you.

Think about it, would you rather have a sitewide link on 1000 all containing the same anchor? Or one "strong" link on the main pge (usually the page with the highest PR) and make it count?

Google dosen't like sitewide's anymore.

Seffy

[Jill]

Google dosen't like sitewide's anymore.

And you know this because...?

[myl]

I can personally comment on a term that we had links on for a long time, changed the terms we had recently to "big blue widgets" and saw a drop in rankings of about 9 spots to a place in the SERPS that our terms never reside.

It was def. fishy, our terms consistently beat out other companies and for our term to drop like that led me to believe site wides can be a bad thing. We had links on this site for 2 years, so the "switching" of links probably threw a flag.

Once I noticed the drop in the SERPS i had the link changed to just the homepage and it popped back up to around the usual spot.

Granted this might not have been what caused it but was def. something worth noting.

[Alex Choo]

A big difference in sitewide and home page links is the cost