Do you think sitewide links hurt your site or do them good, I was of the opinion that a decent sitewide link would help push your site, but recently I had a page ranking position 16-17 in google for about 12 months and it wouldn’t budge after quite a bit of link building so I gave up on the keyword and concentrated on other pages. I noticed the other day I was getting traffic from the keyword so I checked the position, and the page has jumped to position 5-6 this happened at around about the same time I dropped a sitewide link to the page. Now I’m thinking of dropping all sitewides to my site but would like to hear more opinions and experiences on this first thanks
There are lots of times sitewide links are appropriate - in the footer of websites sharing a parent company, when permanent navigation falls across multiple domains, or in blogrolls, which commonly appear on every page of a blog. In my experience, a sitewide link will generally only produce the same results if there were only a couple of links, because I thin SE's understand that only 1 few links are needed. If there are sitewide links on many different sites, all with the same or similar anchor text, then there might be filter that might get tripped.
I'm sure SE's will weigh up where the link is coming from. For instance a WP blogroll sitewide link might not be a problem. That being said, I've just done the same as you and dropped the site wide link to see if it makes any difference. My current standing is that it wouldn't affect it. If doing this could result in a site not increasing further up the rankings, then competitors would spend more time trying to damage each others sites than promoting their own I'm still under the illusion that Google will give you "X" amount of weight for the 1 link and no extra for the duplicates.
Yes I think this is true, but it's a brave move to have 1000 backlinks from one site and then just reduce it to 1.