Sep 18, 2007
I have previously been an advocate for sitewide footer links on the websites you develop - a great chance for users to see who made the site they are looking at. Oh, and not a bad link to have either.Being the sneaky tactician that I am, I have always used these links to get maximum link benefit, because, well, you owe it to yourself to get good value out of your links.
The strategy
The trick has been to mix up the link text you get from your sitewides. If we are talking about a 100 page site, I'd rather have 10 different variations of anchor text from the site, than 100 pages with the same link on them. I also mix up where the links point to, so they don't all point to the homepage. For example, if my link says "web development by Harvey Kane", then the anchor text would be "Web development" and it would point to my "Web development" page, not my homepage.I figure a deep link is more useful than a homepage link, for some reason it seems to be harder to get people to link to an internal page than your homepage.
This strategy has served me very well. I have had a tidy boost in rankings on the phrases I chose for the anchor text on my client's sites.
The problem
The problem is that Google hates links placed by SEOs. Google's algo looks for ways to put SEOs out of business, and therefore it's a good idea to avoid any linking strategy that an algo can detect easily.A sitewide link is pretty easy for an algo to detect. On top of this, I read somewhere that Uncle Matt made mention of sitewides being bad recently, so this is enough for me to warrant a change in strategy.
The new recommendation
I'm going to be using rel=nofollow on my sitewides now, on all pages except the homepage. This way- I still get the benefit of clickthrough traffic (and I believe the footer credit link is valuable to all parties).
- I still get link juice from the homepage, the most powerful page on the site.
- Google can't accuse me of cheating the system with cheesy sitewides.
The downside is that I lose all that lovely anchor text variation. I might have to make up for that in some comment spam or hidden links on hacked forums(*).
Speaking of which, I just found a forgotten gaming forum on a hosting account of mine - the site owner had clearly forgotten about the forum, and the spammers have been having a party while nobody was looking. I'm glad there was no real damage done this time, I've been burned hard in the past from out-of-date forum installs on my shared hosting accounts.
(*) not really.
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Comments
Andrew - Sep 19, 2007
Harvey to quote Chris Beasley
"1000 links from 1 site to you isn't as good as 1 link from 1000 sites to you, but 1000 links from 1 site to you is certainly better than 1 link from 1 site to you."
Sidewide links are a natural part of linking, aside from seo's using it.
Sitewides are devalued, but the cumulative benefit of sitewide links is still more than having one incoming link.
Keeping in mind relevance between the sites is also important.
Harvey - Sep 19, 2007
It's a tough call. I do agree with what you are saying, but then I have a reasonable number of sitewides which makes me look like an SEO.
I still think the key to link building is in keeping a natural looking profile, which will include a certain number of sitewides, recips, spam links and dupe content links. But I think it's important to keep these numbers of links under control, and try to have quality and relevant links making up the bulk of your link profile.
I have always felt that the days of getting benefit from the sitewides would be numbered, so I think I'm going to withdraw gracefully before Google gets nasty about it.
It's worth noting that I could be completely wrong about this and might be about to do something very stupid with my incoming linkage!
Robert - Sep 22, 2007
This can be a problem though when outside sites decide they will link to you from every page. I have discovered many websites that are doing this and I did not request this. One is a site that is a NJ tourism guide for children - at the bottom of every page they include a link to AboutNewJersey.com I have also noticed many real estate sites which link to AboutNewJersy.com from all their pages. A lot of times they are also linking to more than one of AboutNewJersey.com's pages. I can't request them to add no follows to the links and I'm not going to ask them to remove their links to AboutNewJersey.com obviously. So can something like this cause a problem? Can Google think that I'm 'spamming" - even though the only way I even knew they were linking to me was seeing them appear in my stats?
It seems a tricky situation if Google or any other search engine is going to start penalizing a website for sitewide links
Harvey - Sep 22, 2007
I wouldn't worry about it too much Robert. Search engines know that a certain number of sitewide links is perfectly natural, and I wouldn't expect any penalties for this. In your case, they are natural.
It's when you are actively placing sitewides yourself with the express purpose of gaming the search engines that a flag is raised. When you do this, search engines thinks you are trying to game them, which in all fairness, you are.
I say it's all about keeping a varied link profile. Too many sitewides can look spammy, just like too many reciprocals looks spammy. If your site has mostly good links, I say it's ok to have a few sitewides, recips, low PR, bad neighborhood, and otherwise dodgy looking links coming in.
Frank - Oct 2, 2007
Hi Harvey,
Blog software such as Wordpress can encourage users to add sitewide links using the blogroll. Do you have any thoughts on how google would treat such links given that they are often times sitewide with identical link text?
Dunken Francis - Nov 1, 2007
So are you basically saying sitewide links are OK as long as you mix 'em up?
Harvey - Nov 1, 2007
My rule of thumb is to mix up your link pattern, think of links as a balanced diet.
It's perfectly ok to have a greasy burger and every so often, providing most of your meals contain lots of salad and greens.
Same with links - the sitewides can be considered "greasy burgers", reciprocal links are "fizzy soft drink", and word cloud sites are "stodgy mashed potato and cheese".
Just mix it all up with lots of natural citations and non-seo links and it will all work out ok.
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Chris Giddings - Sep 19, 2007
Thanks a bunch for covering this one Harvey. I've been curious about site-wides for a little while now because of rumblings saying they're becoming detrimental... I like your take on it though.
I can see use from having the site-wides in the footer being useful to a user and to me... even if they don't help Google. So, I'll likely start using nofollows as well.