When are sitewide links considered natural?

This example was mentioned directly by Matt mint database  Cutts in the webmaster video mentioned above and is probably the most common type of sitewide link you will see.

Typically, this appears either in a pop-up banner or at the bottom of the page, meaning this link appears throughout your entire website.

This is completely natural, and you don’t have to worry about copyright or privacy policy links causing you SEO problems.

Identify the website designer

Let’s imagine that you are a web designer and you run a website that explains and offers your services.

Whenever a new client engages your services, ask them to include a small mention of your web design services in the footer of their page. This mention would, of course, include a backlink to your website.

Obviously, this backlink is natural and it will not cause any penalty.

Identification of the software

Now let’s assume you design WordPress themes or some other type of software that helps power a website. Here, too, a mention of your company with a link to your website would be perfectly natural.

If you own multiple publications that have their president james wolfensohn own separate websites, it would also be perfectly natural to link those two websites together.

Imagine a news organization with two location-based news publications that use sitewide links to connect their two websites: It just makes sense to link them together.

There is one caveat to this point, however: the two publications you own must be thematically related for sitewide links between the two to be considered natural.

So, if you own one publication about sports cars and another about cat grooming, you probably shouldn’t use sitewide links to connect them. This will only result in penalties for both sites.

How to ensure your sitewide links don’t incur penalties

Interestingly, you don’t need to use the nofollow attribute to protect your website from penalties when it comes to sitewide linking. However, keep the following two points in mind:

  • Anchor text should be brand terms.

Using keywords as anchor text in this case is a bad idea. It will only look spammy to Google and result in penalties. Instead, use the name of the company or publication, or even just the website itself, as the link.

  • Make sure that websites you link to or websites that use sitewide links to your website are highly relevant.

Both websites connected by a sitewide link must be extremely relevant to each other. We briefly mentioned this above, but it’s a very important point that needs to be emphasized.

While it is essential that your sitewide link falls into one of the categories above, it is equally important that your links are relevant.

The Penguin update targets irrelevant, unnatural backlinks. So, if you build relevant, natural links, you’ll avoid penalties.

Final Thoughts on Sitewide Links and SEO

So, sitewide linking for SEO is a dead method. With the Penguin update, this strategy is more trouble than it’s worth and will likely result in penalties.

However, certain types of sitewide links, as we mentioned above, are completely natural and will not incur any penalties.

However, this also means that they are not very helpful for SEO.

In this case, a change in attitude toward sault data sitewide links might be in order. While it may not be great for SEO to have your website appear as a sitewide link on another website, it’s great for public relations!

Scroll to Top