Confirmation That Website Wide Links Are Harmful

I never really believed that website wide links can be damaging to a website, but I was wrong. I set out to disprove the theory and ended up proving that there is a damaging effect from them.

I had typically read on SEO forums that several people thought that website wide links were damaging for a web site, but I was not convinced. I tended to agree with those that said they can not be damaging, reckoning that a website wide link was something out of the web site owner's control and, therefore, not an influencing effect that Google would consider.

But, people did keep coming up with evidence that they were damaging. However, these people never provided full evidence wanting to protect their sites. I thought that perhaps that the reason there were two different schools of thought is that the truth lay somewhere in the middle, so I set up my own experiment to prove, or disprove, the theories for myself.

I run numerous of my own sites and one of them is a relatively new website, which I had recently "claimed" on a ranking system. This claim involved the placement of a random claim sentence on a post, which also appears in many other weblog posts. This, I decided, was amazing for my needs as no-one else would be optimising for a junk sentence, but my web site was mid way down the 4th page of Google search result when the sentence was searched for.

So I inserted a link to the post page from a well established and ranked website, using the sentence as the anchor text. No surprise when some days later the website page suddenly moved to the middle of the 2nd page of Google and a few days later to the top of that 2nd page. Evidence that building links works and that the link had been picked up and done its business.

Next I made the link web site wide before Google again visited the linking web site. Some days later I checked the search engine results and that post was no down on the bottom of the 3rd page and then the top of the 4th page a day or two later. And yet, this was after Google had only picked up 20 pages containing the link.

So never mind website wide, 20 pages out of 3,000 pages on a PR3 web site that is 3 to 4 years old made the site web site go from middle of page 3 to top of page 2 then drop to top of page 4.

Therefore, the bad news is that Google ignores site wide links and the tolerance was very low, around merely 20 pages. Even if rather than an actual punishment as heaps of people claim, it did seem to be more of just ignoring the effects of all of these new links that had suddenly appeared. But as a site designer, or for those designing blog themes, this can mean that placing a link in the footer of new web sites or in new themes might be not getting the benefits you are hoping for.

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