This is something I've come across very recently after someone asked me to remove their sitewide link from my footer. I googled it and quickly found that it can seriously damage your rankings to the point of being thrown off of Google. Something called "Google Bowling" is when a website creates loads of sitewide links to their competitors and gets them penalised. Bowling them out of the rankings. Can anyone confirm this? I've had a sitewide link to my site in my footer for over a year now as I was told this is good on page SEO. But apparently not? I rank very well considering the short time my site has been up so can it really be true? Discuss...
I don't think so, If you put ur website link in another website's footer for long time and site is your website niche, in that case help ur ranking at Google. If you do this work in bulk, may be Google penalize ur website.
The only inbound links that can really hurt your rankings are paid links if Google can prove you paid for them (like by you bragging about it on Google Help Forums using your Google WMT account). But even when Google discovers that you have paid for links, 99.999% of the time they penalize the seller and discount all outbound links from the offending seller's site or URL. The way the buyer is penalized is indirectly... you comtinue to pay the seller for the link but don't get any PR passed to you. So basically there is nothing that inbound links can do to penalize your URL. Google is smart enough to know that if they allowed that then every competitor would be out there getting their competition penalized. Here's a post on Google Bowling from Google's Webmaster Help Forums... Note John Mu's (well respected Googler) responses... specifically: Search for any keyword. Look at the top 20 results. I'll bet you most have site-wide footer links pointing to other sites and those sites also rank perfectly fine for their keywords. MORAL OF THE STORY: Use common sense. Don't believe everything you see here or anywhere else on the web. There are a lot of people who like to spread misinformation either 1) to create chaos or 2) because they don't know WTH they are talking about.
Boy that is bad news for the people on DP that have links in their signature files that show up as much as several thousand times now isn't it? You can't believe everything you read. It's not so much the theory that matters, its what Google views as being spammy, and that is more than a one trick pony. There are a lot of factors that go into determining what is spammy and what is not, and sheer volume of links from a single site may be part of the equation but it is NOT the only factor.
I agree that sitewide links shouldn't hurt your rankings. They may be less beneficial than getting a link on just one or several pages of a site though. The search engines may discount links that appear on every page of a website. This would prevent large websites from getting an advantage in rankings due to having many sitewide internal navigation links. I don't have proof of this, but it would be logical for search engines to do something like this.
I've got a site where my search page is linked to from every other page on the site with the anchor text of "myniche search". The link is in a prominent position in the main menu because I actually want people to use it. The search page does not rank at all for the keyword "myniche search". However, two other pages on my site that have both "niche" and "search" in the page text (and nowhere else) rank #1 and #2 for the term. I'm fairly certain this is a result of a penalty from too many internal links with the same term pointing to the search page. As a side note, the search page does rank #3 for the term "find myniche". So from my experience your internal link structure can get you a penalty for the specific term repeated in the site wide links. I can't confirm anything about external linking.
The footer isn't a good place for links really. Yahoo have a patent that devalues links in the footer and I would imagine that Google has something similar. I'm sure it wouldn't lead to you being penalised though
the thing that really cause the damage is geting huge no. of links in short time site-wide or not its not a matter
I didn't believe it, I just needed some clarification to see if I was missing something. I've been doing SEO for over a year and never have I thought that this sort of "Google Bowling" could be possible. It's like when people say that if they submit to loads of directories then their site will be punished... It's a load of bull created by some conspiricists out there. Logic alone should tell you that if this was the case then competitors would just spam directories with your link. i.e this: Thanks for all your responses guys. Would like to hear a few more though