Are sitewide links penalized by Google?

[solidghost]

So if your link partner is a small site,go for Site wide link.
If your link partner is a big site, try for the main page?

[nuthin]

It's all relative.

I have a site-wide link on a PR7 site and it has helped and contributed in increasing the authority score of my web site tenth-fold over the past 12 months that the link has been in place.

Common sense says that Google is not going to class all these links the same and most will not even be scored or weighted.

But you have to do your background checks on the web site you are getting the link from. Check who they are currently linking out too, how much are they linking out to 'sponsors' and even things such as there navigation structure etc.

Check www.archive.org for age, check Yahoo! or MSN for backlinks pointing to the site you wish to advertise on, even go as far as to check out the background of the other sites that also link to the one you want to advertise on.

It's whatever works best for you. I can not drum it in how much you must research first. If you are buying a link, think long term. Don't expect to get that much trust sent to your site for a good 6 to 12 months, if not longer.

[John Scott]

Long time no see, Nuthin.

[nuthin]

Indeed, it's been a while.

[Cricket]

Is it reunion weekend here at the v7n?

[paulgregory]

There is talk that Google will discount sitewide links. Like the ones at the bottom of every spammers page in the footer. I have done testing, and it is true that a one way link from the home page counts big. When placed in the footer (site-wide) I have had less luck. The links are getting discounted.

Google is looking for sold links. Sitewide are usually sold. I suggest not using site-wide, or try placing your links in the middle or left or right of the page instead of the footer..

Don't stand out at least, if you are going to use them.

[Web Gazelle]

Originally Posted by Webfu

Agent Gazelle, what kind of website did you get a sitewide link from ?

It is a web directory with a PR 6. I was just wanting to be on the homepage but it looks like it is across the entire site.

[bcombs]

I view link building like making a soup. You really don't want too much of any one thing, but you need some meat, some vegetables, some broth and some spices.

Sitewide links are a spice that can be wonderful for organic traffic, and can be helpful for ranking, but just like you wouldn't want too much cumin in your chicken tortilla soup, you don't want too many of them.

As you can see, the imminent Thanksgiving holiday has food on my brain...

[Shawn]

Originally Posted by googlesuccess

I have read somewhere else in this forum that Google does not count links with same anchor text coming from the same site. However recently I have seen some PR7 sites which have thousands of sitewide backlinks indexed in Google from the same site . That confuses me. Are sitewide links really penalized or not counted by Google?

I'd look at the topic first of all. If they are site wide links to an off-topic site, they would more than likely be considered bad. And I guess it all comes down to whether or not the site-wide links themselves are for Google's benefit or your own. In other words, if you're only doing it to rank better in Google, I'd steer away from site-wide links and try to get 1 link per domain in a natural manner.

[SaltLampKing]

This is a confusing topic. To buy or not to buy, I don't think Im sold either way yet.