I never really believed that web site wide links could be damaging to a web site, 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 website, but I was not convinced. I tended to agree with those that said they could not be damaging, reckoning that a site wide link was something out of the website 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 web-sites. I thought that probably 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 loads of of my own web sites and one of them is a relatively new site, 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 a lot of other blog posts. This, I decided, was marvelous for my needs as no-one else would be optimising for a junk sentence, but my 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 blog 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 link building works and that the link had been picked up and done its business.
Next I made the link website wide before Google again visited the linking site. A few 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 just picked up 20 pages containing the link.
So never mind site wide, 20 pages out of 3,000 pages on a PR3 website that is 3 to 4 years old made the website website 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 web site wide links and the tolerance was very low, round just 20 pages. Even though rather than an actual punishment as stacks of people claim, it did seem to be more of only ignoring the effects of all of these new links that had suddenly appeared. But as a web site designer, or for those designing blog themes, this can mean that placing a link in the footer of new sites or in new themes could be not getting the benefits you are hoping for.
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