should i be buying sitewide links or just homepage links?

Yes, that does sound like getting a sitewide isn't just useless, it can actually harm your site (I mean the site linked to).

 

Yeah but it would be too easy to hurt your competition if that was the case. There's something more to it than just simply sitewide links.

 

Because you have a greater chance of getting a click through to your site because it has exposure on many pages of another site as opposed to just one.

 

Correct. Notice in the post i said it was an "aged" sitewide. IE. The link had been in place pointing to "X" page for 2 years. Then all of a sudden the link text is different and points to "Y" page instantly across thousand of pages, so it looked "fake".

I agree just pointing a ton of links to a competitor would be too easy to hurt them in the SERPS.

 

Well... I've received several PM's and it would took me to long to analyze all the keywords you sent me guys. So, I'd better show you an example so you could do it yourself.

Let's take "offshore software development" keyphrase as an example.

Firstly, our aim is to be #1 in Google. Right?

So let's take a look at the website which is #1 right now: http:// www . effectivesoft . com/

First of all we need to obtain all the possible backlinks pointing to this website from Yahoo! (Because Yahoo! shows much more backlinks than, say, Google). Of course I didn't do it manually

If we take 1,000 backlinks from Yahoo (unfortunately 1,000 is the maximum what we can get from any SE), we will see that more than 35% of all backlinks have "software developers" as anchor text. And about 10% more use "custom software development company". Here is more detailed info on anchor texts for this website:

software developers     35.5% (355 backlinks)
custom software development company     8.7% (87 backlinks)
custom software development     6.2% (62 backlinks)
outsource programming   4.8% (48 backlinks)
custom programming      4.4% (44 backlinks)
software company        2.5% (25 backlinks)
offshore software development   2.2% (22 backlinks)

Code (markup):

Now let's go to Google and check this website rankings for its anchor-text-keyphrases:
They are #3 for "software developers" (out of 137,000,000 other websites!!!),
They are #1 for "custom software development company" (out of 38,100,000).

So the conclusion is obvious - anchor texts rule the SEO world


In about 90% of all the keyphrases they use in anchor texts we can find the following words:

software        76.2% (762 backlinks)
developers      38.2% (382 backlinks)
development     32.9% (329 backlinks)
custom  26.9% (269 backlinks)
company 15.0% (150 backlinks)
programming     12.6% (126 backlinks)
offshore        7.3% (73 backlinks)

Code (markup):

As we can see, "offshore", "software", "development" are frequent guests in these phrases.

99.3% of links pointing to this website are pointing to the homepage. So, this guys don't get bothered with deep linking or another SEO tricks - they simply bomb Google with their keyphrases, and seems like Google loves his. :shoked:

Now it's high time to take a look at their PageRank: PR of this exact website is 4. They are in top3 for SO competitive phrases, and PR is only 4!!! (I wouldn't like to state anything but seems like guys claiming that PR is not so important as it used to be, are right... thought, I can be wrong)

Here is a table displaying PR info of the webpages linking back to our "guinea-pig" website

PageRank 0      34.8% (348 backlinks)
PageRank 3      23.5% (235 backlinks)
PageRank 4      18.2% (182 backlinks)
PageRank 5      13.3% (133 backlinks)
PageRank 2      7.5% (75 backlinks)
PageRank 6      1.1% (11 backlinks)
PageRank 1      1.0% (10 backlinks)
PageRank 7      0.5% (5 backlinks)

Code (markup):

No wounder that their PR is only 4

Now let's unveil yet another popular SEO myth: many people say that you can't promote your website without blogs and forums. Let's see at our
example:

http:// www . softwaredevelopmentblog.com
http:// www . miamiphp . org
http:// cpcblog . ticton . com
http:// www . asalesforum . com
http:// www . blogion . com
http:// www . goweblog . com
http:// www . surfer-talk . com

Code (markup):

They have backlinks from less than 10 blogs and forums. And they are still in top10. Seems that links from blogs and forums are not so important.
In spite of this, this info can still be extremely useful for sites in other niches. You can easily find brilliant web-resources you haven't
even had an idea of where you can promote your websites, products or services.

Let come back to the topic of our discussion: Site-wide links vs. Homepages.

As we can see this website has about 100 (out of 1,000) links from homepages - here are the PR's of these homepages:

PageRank 3      12.2% (12 homepages)
PageRank 4      35.7% (35 homepages)
PageRank 5      24.4% (24 homepages)
PageRank 6      8.1% (8 homepages)
PageRank 7      6.1% (5 homepages)

Code (markup):

Seems like thouse guys don't mind buying a couple of links from homepages (You can check it yourself - most of these links a paid ones)

Next, site-wide links: they can be found on the following websites

http:// www . geekpedia . com/ (305 links with the "Software Developers" anchor text in the "Other Resources" section)
http:// www . softwaredevelopmentblog . com/ (45 links with the "Custom Software Development Company" anchor text in the "Favorite blogs" section)
http:// www . surfer-talk . com/ (39 links with the "Custom Programming" anchor text in the "Partners" section)
http:// www . investmentbankingcentral . com/ (32 links with the "Custom Software Development Company" anchor text in the "Favorite blogs" section)
http:// www . miamiphp . org/ (22 links with the "Custom Software Development" anchor text in the "Sponsors" section)
http:// www . edrawsoft . com/ (21 links with the "Software Company" anchor text in the "Quick Links" section)
http:// www . snerdey . com/ (18 links with the "Software Design" anchor text in the "Sponsors" section)
http:// www . coastmailers . com/ (15 links with the "Outsource Programming" anchor text an the bottom of the page)
http:// www . webhostiq . com/ (15 links with "Custom Programming" anchor text an the bottom of the page)
....
and about 15 more...

Code (markup):

Again, these guys buy site-wide links as well, and we can see that they got about 100 links from homepages and about 500 site-wides. And here I'd better keep silence Anyone in this thread is clever enough to interpret this info But as I said in my previous post "a good SEO never says never!". Just to explain my words: these guys have more than 200 RECIPROCAL links!.. So, as we can see that at least 100 + 500 + 200 = 800 links (out of 1,000) were obtained in a NON-NATURAL manner. So, I'd better stop arguing here and go and get yet another link - no matter wether they are site-wides, links from homepages, reciprocal or whatever )) The only thing I know for sure that if you build links - you WILL be in top10, even for a VERY competitive keyword.


Good luck,
APECTAHT

 

Dude, thanks for the amazing effort in putting together this post. You are a valuable member of this community regardless of whether one of your conclusions or another does not find favor. BTW, in this analysis, did you reach any conclusions about the value of directory links?

 

++ Also, for established sites, sitewides rock

IT

 

In most cases it depends on your niche, Ajeet. Anyway just take your own competitor, analyze it and get your own specific results - this will take you only 5-15 minutes. There are some tools available that can do all the work for you. For example, here is a good free one.

 

I think one link from theme based page is much better than anything else

 

Go for sitewide Links !!

 

You should get sidewide links mainly for traffic purposes.If your focus is on building backlinks then i suggest deep linking and different anchor text.

 

I'll give you a keyword, one i always had trouble conquering "poetry"

 

The one thing that great post about link-analysis did NOT take into account was the age of the domain in question. Old domains can certainly risk what new ones cannot.

 

absolutely. old domains who are seen as authoritative have HUGE leeway when it comes to issues that smaller new sites might even get completely kicked out of google for.

 

Domain created on 03-27-2003 (3 years, 9 months)

This is the youngest site on the first Google results page:

url: http://www.effectivesoft.com/	age: 3 years, 9 months
url: http://www.savitr.com/	age: 8 years, 3 months
url: http://www.offshore-development.co.uk/	age: N/A
url: http://www.ishir.com/	age: 7 years
url: http://www.stylusinc.com/	age: 7 years, 7 months
url: http://www.scnsoft.com/	age: 6 years
url: http://www.a1technology.com/	age: 7 years, 7 months
url: http://www.e-zest.net/	age: 6 years, 11 months
url: http://www.kring.com/	age: 6 years, 9 months
url: http://www.machrotech.com/	age: 7 years

Code (markup):

Is it experimental data or just your opinion?

 

Your very example shows that you are talking about aged domains: 3 years old is ancient by internet time tables. New sites, with less trust, are not going to get away with this. They have to play by the new rules.

No, I haven't done the research. I do have common sense though.
We know that:
a) google frowns upon bought links and tries all kinds of ways to find them
b) google will discount all links they suspect of being bought. They told us they will simply stop a site from being able to pass pagerank.
c) sitewide links are usually bought (except for blogs, that's a different story)

It is pretty easy for anybody with some math under their belt (I used to be a maths teacher) to see that it would be easy for google to find out whether a link is sitewide and then to put a filter on those links to weigh them less or ignore them.

Conclusion: I don't need to test this, it's pretty obvious that sitewides are not likely to bring a lot of increased pagerank, let alone trust-rank which is what really counts in the search engines these days.

 

Good post APECTAHT. I'd tend to lean towards not buying sitewide links until you've established your site and already have a good number of non-sitewide links from various domains. If you jump out of the box and have thousands of sitewide links you're likely to get flagged and stuck in the abyss for a long while.

 

if you are buying links for seo purposes, stick to the homepage links. Multiple links on the same IP are not helpful. Homepage links will be very important for seo in the future. I am not going to say how, but it will.

 

You just want to get your website around, right?

And you found nothing, it is just yours, right?

 

No link is bad as long as it relates to the page/site.