Sitewide Links
It’s well known that a site which gathers links too quickly can be penalised by search engines – but what about sitewide links ?
Are they just discounted to count as one link by search engines or is the effect more significant ?
Well over the last month we conducted a small experiment with a couple of sites.
Firstly we have a site which has not been highly promoted, but has been getting a trickle of natural search traffic. We added a link to it from an article directory with over 50,000 pages. Almost immediately the natural search traffic dried up.
A couple of weeks later the links where removed. Traffic came back in a few days.
So now we turned our attention to this site. In the early days I promoted it any way I could – sometimes copping a 2 or 3 month trip to the sin bin, courtesy of our friends at Google and Yahoo.
All the way through it though I’ve had a sitewide link on the same article directory above.
After seeing the results of the sitewide link on the newer site, we decided to try removing the site wides pointing here. I had thought about doing it on an off for a while but never did because I was afraid the sudden removal of the links would have a negative effect.
Its a bit harder to tell what the real results are with a more mature site. However, since removing the links serps have stayed static for the major terms but we seem to be getting a lot more traffic from the long tail keywords.
Overall traffic appears to have risen. Could be coincidence (natural fluctuation) but it feels like removing the links from the article directory has had a positive effect.
For me the take-away from this experiment is two fold:
- Always make small changes to your sites, watch the results and take action accordingly. When it come to search engines, there is always an opportunity to make small improvements by tweaking the on-site and off-site SEO
- This has confirmed for me, that its best to stay clear of site-wide links for sites where natural search is an important component of incoming traffic. They do more harm than good.
If you’ve done some experimentation with sitewide links, please drop some notes below so other readers may benefit from your experience.
Filed under: Search Engines
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Holy cow. Now this is interesting. People are always so quick to try and buy sitewide links, and I’ve been using them myself on my network. Time to think twice about that one then. Thanks for the heads up.
Great Post. site-wide links aren’t what everyone thinks.
Site-wide links are unnatural. No one has site-wide links to other, unrelated sites, unless they’re doing it for SEO. I’ve read footer links are being discounted as well.
Google is always going after artificial SERP manipulation schemes. Your job is to mimic a popular site. Easy! [grin].
Yep, I experienced Google’s wrath on my new site. I’ve been doing some low intensity linking and in a week the site received a penal. I learned my lesson now – take it slow. Really slow ;)
Sorry to hear that magic! Google has also been coming down hard on real estate website for reciprocal linking
interesting observation.
From my past experiences, adding sitewide links have helped the natural ranking in a long run.
Yes, Google is really hard to play with, so for the beginning you just have to start with something lower than Google,I’ve been tried with site-wide links, but never put an importance on it, so from now on, i’m changed my mind !
No! Don’t do it. Google has began to devalue sitewide links, just the same if you were to buy links from a site that clearly says Sponsored links or Advertising. You’ll be spending good money for nothing.