How Site wide Links Affect Your Link Building Efforts
I am sure you would have read a lot about site wide links. Through this post I would like to address the issues piling around the much discussed concept of Site Wide Links. Do they benefit us? Can they be a pain in the butt? Stay tuned as we discuss Site Wide links today.
What are Site Wide Links?
Any hyperlink or a group of links featuring consistently on every page of the website and leading to the same target page are called sitewide links. Here are visuals of some common site wide links formats widely in use today.
Sample Site Wide Link Blocks we see everyday
What’s so particular about Site Wide Links?
They are very important for a webpage, as they form the primary navigation blocks that are consistent across the site. So the internal links from the Navigation blocks are very important from a visitor’s point of view. If you have paid some attention to the Google Sitelinks of various sites you would notice a majority of them happen to be Site Wide Links.
So why do they say links from Site Wide blocks are not beneficial?
Even I have come across claims in top SEO forums that Site Wide Links can actually cause your SERPs to drop if it happens in a large scale for the same target URL and same anchor text. I will now attempt to justify the reason why Google is so partial about Site Wide links.
As SEO practices became rampant Google had to layout certain guidelines to evaluate link quality. If you are familiar with On Page SEO and element position with respect to display screen you would know that – elements at the top-left position of a page happen to be the most important while the elements in the bottom right corner tend to be the least important.
That would now be obvious why an “above the fold” top-menu is more powerful than “under the fold” footer links, while both of them appear site-wide.
That is not all. Going back to Google’s guidelines for evaluating the value of a link, they are very particular about relevance. While for internal links site-wide links may be important, external links tend to be lesser important when they are site wide. Why? An external link is supposed to be a reference and there is no point one should put it on every page. It definitely cannot be relevant from every page, right? Since they are external links and do not form a part of site navigation they are devalued.
Further the link trading has led to stricter control of external site wide links. So next time you invest resources into acquiring links do not prefer Site Wide Links.
Such links are responsible for “PR leakage” from your site. The amount of link juice that could flow to other pages is affected as the number of out bound links remains the same while the Site Wide Links do not take with them their quota of link juice. They are given a heavy discount in this matter.
Quantifying the effect from an ‘under the fold’ site wide link
Does it amount to one out bound link? Does it amount to N external links where N=no of pages in the site? I cannot say that for sure. It definitely depends on the size of the site. While the same footer link from a tiny site with 5 pages could amount to full 5 external links, the same when placed on a million page website might actually deliver the effect of less than one external link. Some people even claim such links prove to be detrimental for the target URL, but I will stand by my belief that Google does not penalize you for any inbound links.
Feel free to comment to continue the discussion further.
Category: SEO
About the Author (Author Profile)
Rooturaj leads a Start Up Consultancy and SEO Company in Delhi. He likes travelling and taking snaps. He promotes Tour Packages for Rajasthan and many popular Indian destinations as well.Subscribe
If you enjoyed this article, subscribe to receive more just like it.
Twitter: BrianHumek
says:
I used to look for websites that would have “recent comments” with do follow links (or so I hoped) and comment on them. On one large blog, it showed I had 500 inbound links. Looking on websitegrader.com, it would show my inbound links sometimes at 4000 or so because I did that quite regularly. But then websitegrader changed the way it counted links and then started listing only the number of linking domains, totally ignoring the sitewide links and only counting one linking domain for those 500 or so pages of a website which had my link added to a “recent comment.”
That’s when I realized that sitewide links aren’t as important.
Great post.
Brian recently posted..The Myth of a Giftless Christmas
Whether the tool you use to count your links is ignoring site wide links or not is not an ultimate indication for them not to have any value but you are right that they seem to be much less important. Also I think that Rooturaj analyzed the site wide links’ importance in the article very well.
Assaf recently posted..Menozac Menopause Symptoms Relief Review
Twitter: jonanscher
says:
So I’m curious, are my links for following me on Twitter or seeing my LinkedIn profile harming me since they are on every page of my online portfolio?
Twitter: bsbhupendra771
says:
Site Wide Links is important for SEO and i think some time it count as internal link.But how it effect “PR leakage it’s very new information for me.Thanks for sharing
Bhupendra Sharma recently posted..How To Get Free Backlinks
Twitter: Jajodia_Saket
says:
I have never heard about “Site Wide links”, thanks for letting me know about something new and how it can affect..!!
Saket Jajodia recently posted..How To Create Your Own Facebook Cover For Your New Facebook Timeline Profile
I still doubt that they have any influence on the site ranking and indexing, as they are mostly for visitors and i have read the post and it hasn’t persuaded me to change my opinion.
Twitter: AffiLateNetwork
says:
Site wide links are perfect for internal page,like you said.
Anyway I believe that,even if the effect are decreased compared to past years,they still works for external links also
Thanks for your tips.
This is the way all ad management systems work with it. all of them uses site wide links. i am not sure about how google behave with it. but i am sure it is so important for SEO.
Although the concept of site wide links is an old one and Google started considering them as spam a couple of years before the Caffiene update, the key issue isn’t necessarily the use of site wide links, but the way in which those links are used. Outbound links in the footer, with no anchor text are marked as spam, whereas outbound links located in the middle of a page’s code and surrounded by a paragraph of relevant text are considered to have some merit. I’ve seen sites loose their entire PR due to site wide outbound links in the footer, but have yet to see this happen to site wide links with anchor text, placed in the middle of the page’s code. It is all however subjective and very much down to applying moderation to everything.
Richard from Cambridge recently posted..IT-Green granted WEEE AATF license for computer/ electronics recycling
Seems like good for all as you said in your this post site wide links are good from the view point of Seos.
goa carnival recently posted..Goa Carnival 2012
Before reading this post, i used to think that such links help the site. Now need to do a rethinking and will try to avoid such links.
Twitter: HughesGroupRE
says:
I wasn’t aware of how detrimental site-wide links could potentially be, but it looks like what we thought was a great opportunity really isn’t! Though I’m curious if the problem also has to do with building a ‘natural’ variety of links to a page. Right now as we are trying to raise traffic for our site, whenever we utilize anchor text we change it up now and then – though still for the same page. Just like how a ‘natural web profile’ has a mixture of do-follow and no-follow links (primarily no-follow), just on a variation of anchor texts. Something to think about.
Daniel recently posted..Boise Real Estate- Time to Buy?
Thanks Rooturaj for sharing your thoughts
I’m a little bit ignorant to these site wide links matter but as I can see that if we put some “standard pages” like “about” and “contact” pages above the fold, it doesn’t hurt.
Just one thing I’m not sure is that my “home” page is linking to a hidden page as I want it to be static. Does it hurt?
Duy recently posted..By: black_raven
I don’t imagine that Google would penalize you for this as you then spam your competition.Equally a regular contributor to a forum would get in trouble.
I don’t use any wide links at all as I believe only in common usual links that i build for my site and which really work and bring some benefit for the site.
Twitter: techiebug
says:
Site wide links improve page ranks of individual pages, Google also loves it, as visitors gets good navigation of our site.
kishore recently posted..Dell Venue Pro Updated To WIndows Phone 7.5-How To Upgrade To Windows Phone 7.5(Mango)
So I’m curious, are my links for following me on Twitter or seeing my LinkedIn profile harming me since they are on every page of my online portfolio?
It is important to understand as few of my friends have been penalized by the Google for having site wide links to their websites. Natural link building is becoming more and more popular day by day.
Very Interesting Post. I think now Google is disliking sitewide backlinks. More sitewide links to your site more you are liable to be penalized by google. However for Yahoo and Bing these are very good.
Such an incredible article buddy. I found it very informative and interesting.Thanks a lot for sharing.
Lesson Plan recently posted..Christmas Gift List Planner
Where does Google say they penalize us for site wide links? I quite sure they do not give much extra love but that they penalize I think is not correct as it would cause competitors to spam each other. In time Google will find better ways of determining the quality of the link and we will have to change our game.
Hi Guys,
I apologize for replying late.Pretty glad to see the good turnout and I thank Shiva for the opportunity to have published my article.
I have noticed some people fearing sitewide links claiming using them will irk google and bring negative score to your internet marketing associations. Here I would tell you what I believe – I believe backlinks can never harm you. They can only be discounted. Else I could bring you down with low quality links instead of building high quality links to my own sites.
Even then I have some of my high profile SEO friends would bet that a really crap backlink profile can harm your SEO efforts. That is true but only true for content farms who do not bring with them any quality. But again it means quality content will bring you quality links too. So kind of vicious circle there.
Twitter: sakshamtalwar
says:
So, you are the writer of this awesome post. Well done Rooturaj
Saksham Talwar recently posted..WordPress Newsletter Plugins – Free & Premium
This is a wonderful information Rooturaj, I really appreciate the knowledgeable information you shared to your reader. I got to admit this is my first time to encounter information about Site Wide link and how it can effect our website. I really appreciate all the information you shared and I look forward for more SEO tips that is very important in optimizing once website.
Twitter: sakshamtalwar
says:
Site-wide links are really very harmful! They once used to give a lot of link juice, but now, they do nothing, but help us in ranking after all the other web pages. They harm a lot now!
Saksham Talwar recently posted..Site-wide Links – Why You Shouldn’t Build Nor Have Them On Your Blog!
I am back on my guestpost for a little update.
I said in the previous comments and in the article – “backlinks cannot hurt you, they can only be discounted”. Fellas after the Penguin update this belief of mine has been pulverized to fine dust.
So YES backlinks do hurt now.
Rooturaj recently posted..400 Bad Request Your browser sent a request that this server could not understand