Site Wide Links Help or Hurt Linking Campaign?
Barry’s Search Engine Roundtable Forums has a nice thread going on about whether or not site-wide links (as opposed to targeted page links or individual blog post links) help or hurt a site, whether those links are paid or organically earned.
Benjamin Pfeiffer of RankSmart lends his thoughts on how each search engine is treating Site Wide Links:
* Google seems to have caught on to the site wide linking approach earlier on then most engines.
* Yahoo is a bit slow
* MSN is even slower
* Ask they seem to have no effect in my experience.
Ben adds that a random link buying & building approach may add to a site’s overall backlink (Google Juice?) value:
There has been a bountiful amount of discussion on this in the past. Effectively I would count a site wide link on an entire site as one large link. The best approach I think is rather instead of a site wide link a webmaster should approach a website by targeting individual pages and taking a slower more covert approach to obtaining links. I don’t mean hide links, but do your linking in a way that appears more natural. Place links here and there. This would thus make it more difficult to determine patterns in your approach.
I’d also suggest placing an ROI value in your linking equation. If a link from that site would ideally send future customers and relevant traffic to your site, business or service then that link is of value way beyond that of search engine optimization. Links which will lead to more sales directly from those links, and also potentially help with search engine rankings, are the juiciest links in the bunch, and worth pushing the envelope (or the wallet) to achieve.
