The more back-links you have, the better you rank in Google!
This is a common webmaster’s mindset. Any less-experienced webmaster believes that if more web-pages point to his site, his site will rank higher in search engines. But this is not true! Except the quantity & quality of back-links, there are some more issues that need to be addressed! One of them is site-wide links.
What are site-wide links?
Any link or a bunch of many links displayed on each and every page of a website and linking to the same page are called site-wide links. Site-wide links can further be divided into two types – Internal site-wide links and External site-wide links. While the first one doesn’t harm a website’s rankings in search engines, the latter seems to hurt the search engine rankings badly!
Why Don’t The Internal Site-wide Links Harm?
Any website or a blog generally has a lot of internal site-wide links i.e. all the pages of that website, link to other pages of the same website. This means that there’s a set of common internal links on all the pages of that website.
Google doesn’t penalize blogs who have internal site-wide links because it’s too general for a blog to have a lot of site-wide internal links. Some pages like contact page, privacy page, about us page, categories appear on all the pages of a website. Google is well aware of this and as a result it doesn’t harm displaying site-wide internal links.
Thus even if you have a lot of internal site-wide links on your website, Google will not penalize your blog.
Why Do The External Site-wide Links Harm?
Links from the same website to a bunch of external pages (pages from an external site) are called as external site-wide links. The external site wide links tend to harm search engine rankings.
Until a few months back, external site-wide links used to help a lot in transferring link juice, but now that Google is aware of this link building method, it has started penalizing both the parties – the one which links to an external page consistently from all the pages and the page receiving a lot of links from the same website!
Google now weighs links based on their position on your website. For example, Google values above the fold links (navigation bar) more than the under the fold links (footer links). Though both of them appear on all your blog pages, the above the fold links are considered to be more important than the below the fold links.
Also under the fold links are used for spamming by a lot of bloggers who either sell links to companies and add those links in their blog’s footer or by the webmasters who sponsor WordPress themes or sponsor Blogspot themes to gain a lot of links from the same blog.
Google’s Simple Policy
Google values external site-wide links negatively because such links stop the Google algorithm from functioning properly and often reduces the quality of search results shown in Google.
The external site-wide links are also responsible for pagerank leakage. If all pages of your blog link to an external page, all the pages separately donate some link juice to the external link and increase its pagerank. This is something Google doesn’t like because it considers too many links pointing to an external page from all the pages of the same website as sponsored links / paid links and not as referral links.
Thus, Google has come up with a simple policy – Penalize sites having too many external site-wide links.
Why You Shouldn’t Build Nor Give Site-wide Links?
As I said Google hates site-wide links. Google penalizes both the parties i.e. the linking site as well as the site being linked. Thus if you build site-wide links, you rankings will sooner or later drop in search engines and you may even experience a permanent ban in Google! The same applies if you sell site-wide links on your blog!
So stay away from external site-wide links. Never build them, nor sell them!
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Last Updated: February 23, 2012
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{ 29 comments… read them below or add one }
nice post.. :D
thanks
Welcome Ciar! :)
thanks a lot. I will removing the external links ASAP.
Remove only the site-wide external links Sonia!
Thanks for this amazing article. ‘Site-wide links’ is a new term to me, thanks for making me aware of the harmful effects of such links.
You are welcome! Beware of sitewide links. Please do consider mentioning this article on your blog or sharing it with your friends :)
Oh I see… Thanks for the share buddy !! Will look into this matter and update the external links as required
Yeah, do that for sure! And remember “site-wide external links” :)
Great post! Keep the good work continues… \m/
Thank you Amrik :)
This post really great for new comers. It can hurt your ranking in Google. Thanks for sharing.
You are welcome. And it’s also a must read for those who actively buy and sell links on their sites!
Oh wow. I never knew this was the case nowadays. I’ll certainly update mine. Thanks!
You must Aby! Site-wide links harm like nothing else!!
Some time ago I added site-wide links to my blog on my client’s blog, in the footer of course. He’s got about 200 posts on his blog, so that means that there are more than 200 site-wide links to my blog :(. Oops! I think I should ask him to remove it…
Do the anchir text of that link contain a keyword? If no i.e. if the anchor text is your blog / site name, you shouldn’t get it removed as a non-keyword link generally doesn’t harm. You can check my footer section and you will find a site-wide link to my company’s site.
Anchor is my surname. But I don’t use it as one of my keywords.
It’s fine then :)
Agreed. SWL seems only to be negative only when Keyword terms are used.
time to get rid of some links at the bottom of my pages! thanks for the interesting read!
Welcome! Do remove all the site-wide footer links and you may see an upward rank boost!
I too have some links on the footer but they are not outward bound, they are the links to internal pages.. I hope it wont harm my site in anyways.. Your suggestions please
Hello, these links won’t harm. Being internal links, Google understands their purpose (they could be recent posts, common pages like contact page, etc.). So don’t worry. But remember one thing, don’t add a lot of internal site-wide links to your blog as they may reduce the link jhuice given to each page and the linking pages may rank lower (marginal rank decrease is possible).
Interesting. I haven’t really experienced this, though I only have one situation where I have one site pointing to another using a site-wide link. Neither site has really seemed to suffer, though they’re also pretty closely related in terms of relevance, so maybe that fact helps me overcome any potential penalty for this. I could see how it would be a big issue for people selling links to non-relevant sites, though.
Chris, yeha, it doesn’t affect much if it’s a highly related site. For example I link to my company’s website from my blog footer, and I haven’t faced any serious penalty. So relevance is a factor that matters a lot here!
Nice post , and i must reduce site wide links too
You must if you have a lot of site-wide links on your pages. :)
Then you have to make sure you do not have any dead site-wide links on your home page. Google really looks down on links that are no more and will eventually lower your PR for it.
I am always amazed at how many websites I come across that allowed their web developer to put site wide links back to them in the footer. Funny. So many SEO hacks still implementing tactics from the 90′s. Nice post