Site wide links

[adybee]

Just wondering - I keep hearing a lot about penalties for site wide links - but i'm not sure as to how this can be - if you have a site linking to a page that is relevant i.e. the website linking sell red widgets and the page linked to is about red widgets - how can G penalise you? Surely that's a relevant link? :confused:

[Chris Boggs]

Hi adybee. the talk about penalties for sitewide links has made people anxious over the past year or so. The consensus opinion is that there is no penalty for having a sitewide link, rather Google may discount the links and only count one of them from the site. Other search engines seems to treat this differently, with sitewides seemingly currently having a more positive effect on rankings within MSN, but a similar devaluing in Yahoo!.

What sems to have happened is that people were enjoying rankings prior to the devaluation of multiple links from the same domain, and saw a dip when the links lost value. Naturally, this led some people to claim there was a penalty, but this is not likely the case.

Chris Beasley actually summed this up nicely just recently: http://www.websitepublisher.net/blog/2007/01/04/site-wide-links/

[glengara]

I'd take a slightly different POV, while site-wides and crosslinking won't garner penalties "per se" they do raise flags IMO, and too many raised flags in your linkage and it can get deemed a "links scheme designed to improve...".