Years ago, it was very easy to get from the parking lot to the plane’s boarding gate.
The airport security check was hardly a waste of time.
Going through the airport was easy and straightforward How sitewide links affect SEO in a post-Penguin world.
Of course, in a post-9/11 world, all of this has changed.
And although we complain about the long lines at security every time we fly, we all know that these security measures are there for our own protection.
Thank goodness we’re all pretty happy to be flying safely rather than the opposite.
Backlinking used to be much easier, too . We used something called sitewide links—links that appear on all pages of a website, like links in a sitewide header, footer, or sidebar—for quick backlinking.
You could easily place sitewide links or have sitewide links to your website placed on other websites and this would quickly improve your SERP rankings .
However, like the days of lax airport security, the days of sitewide backlinks for SEO are long gone.
We now live in a post-Penguin world , where Google’s Penguin update dominates the backlinking scene. And while we’re likely to complain, we know that these updates are truly designed to benefit both the searcher and the searched for.
So, what’s the problem with sitewide links? Is there a safe way to use sitewide links? And how do sitewide links affect SEO?
Let’s find out!
Why sitewide backlinks became popular
A few years ago, sitewide links became teacher database extremely popular.
It was an incredibly easy way to get a lot of backlinks quickly, so many people started developing methods to allow other websites to link to their site quickly and easily.
This brought them tons of new backlinks and was fantastic for SEO.
Why?
Well, before Penguin, backlinking was much more focused on quantity than quality. If you wanted to see an increase in your SERP rankings, collecting lots of backlinks was the answer, regardless of quality.
Many different black hat schemes were developed to quickly obtain a large number of sitewide links, and for a time these sites saw increased SERP rankings.
However, these schemes resulted in penalties for quite a few websites when Google started rolling out their Penguin updates.
Post-Penguin: What happened to sitewide linking?
Google’s Penguin update targeted unnatural regional operations leader wendi mucke link building efforts. Many different forms of backlinks were suddenly penalized, and websites using these methods suddenly fell in the SERPs.
Unfortunately, site-wide links were also targeted.
So, what does Google want to achieve with this update?
A link that isn’t natural is dangerous for your website. Penguin looks for penalties for backlinks that are spammy or unrelated, and it cracks down on these black hat methods for quickly building low-quality backlinks.
This means that sitewide links to your website that do not meet certain criteria will result in penalties for both sites.
Are sitewide links always dangerous for SEO?
Does the above information mean that you can never place sitewide links on your website?
No, not necessarily.
As Matt Cutts explains very succinctly in this webmaster video , there are some types of sitewide links that are completely natural.
This means that you could place sitewide links on your page, or someone could link sitewide to your website, and it could be perfectly fine.
We will discuss what these specific situations uae phone number would be below.
However, this thought raises another important issue: If natural sitewide links are not dangerous, will they help my website’s SEO?
The fact is that Google pays very little attention to links placed in certain areas of your website.
This means that Google actually gives very little weight to links in sidebars, headers, or footers. In other words, while these links don’t hurt your SEO, they aren’t particularly helpful either.
So, what exactly are these natural sitewide links? Let’s look at four examples.