should i be buying sitewide links or just homepage links?

I myself tend to give the option of choosing their prime location of the home page before offering a sitewide to a particular niched site.

 

Get sitewide links only from a related site though.

 

yeah that depend if the site isn't design well or the site is not original.
All of our customers are very satisfy with sitewide backlink

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&...GGL:en&q=link:www.top10crimes.com&btnG=Search

 

A good, targeted directory can be a good backlink. The kind of directories over at DP is usually not targeted and therefor not likely to do you much good. Won't hurt either, but don't link back to them unless you really personally think they have a good resource going.

As for trying to copy what competitors are doing - that's usually not workable. Their rankings will be based on
1) a few quality backlinks they got when the web was young
2) can include sitewides and stuff like that, because they have those few quality backlinks. The sitewides may be there, but they won't be why the rank well.
3) age: age brings a certain amount of trust in google. to compete you must be different and play by today's rules, not yesterday's. Yesterday sitewides worked because each link was counted. Today each extra link from the same domain is counted less then the one before. Beyond a certain point (no idea where, but more than 20 is probably useless) they will alert google that something fishy may be going on.
4) links work on related article pages.
5) links work on domains that come up in the top 20 or something in google: those are likely trusted domains.

 

Sitewide Links in general provide very little help to gain PR so I would not recommend to go for more sitewide links if you could get good single page PR links. Small sites having sitewides wouldnt help much IMHO.

 

that depents on where you are buying link . if i buy from pr 9 site , it's ok for me to buy from home . i dont want so much

 

If your going to buy sitewides see if the webmaster is willing to link out to different pages of your site. Having sitewides pointing to a homepage isnt very beneficial. Having sitewides that point to all the different pages of your site will do allot for you.

Each link is counted as a backlink if you do that. I did that between 2 sites I own and increased their backlinks by at least 10,000 each.

 

The search engines are looking for "natural" links.

It would be hard to make a good argument for a sitewide link looking as a natural vote for a site. It looks more like a purchased link.

Having said that, the odd one shouldn't hurt an established site.

 

Correct but who is Google to say what is natural and what isnt if each link points to a different site?? As long as the sites are related in content/theme there shouldnt be a problem. Companies cross promote each other's services all the time. It would be foolish for Google to penalize sites for doing this.

 

I have recently changed an aged, old sitewide (several years old) with a different term pointing to a different page on my site. The next day the term dropped about 7-8 spots in the SERPS, which is extremely uncommon for our landing pages. I am pretty certain it caused it b/c when I instructed the webmaster to make our links only appear on his home page the ranking went back up once the change was made. So Site wides can hurt your rankings IMO.

 

I don't understand what you mean by "if each link points to a different site??". Sitewide links all point to the same site.

Google spends 10s of millions of dollars and a bunch of PhDs to figure out what is natural.

They may just ignore the links. If a new site has mostly sitewide links, Google wouldn't see any advantage of ranking it high (compared to the thousands of similar sites).

Remember, they are not a fan of recip links either.

 

Darn it. I meant "each link points to the same site but each link points to a unique url on that site". I was typing without re-reading. Anyway I've seen these type of sitewides work well because that's what I use and havent had an issue with yet. Google can't really tell if these are natural or not. Who says a page about Italy from Site A linking to a page about Italy on Site B is natural or not.....Looks natural to me bought or not.

 

We are talking about 1 link from site A to site B. We are talking about hundreds, thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands of links from site A to site B.

 

Better go for home page links on different sites; this way you will have at least one page with higher page rank.

 

I'm very well aware of what the topic at hand just alittle ahead of myself

In a nutshell: If a webmaster is not willing to link to unique and individual pages on your site than stick with a homepage link. If the webmaster is willing to link to unique pages of your site than go for the sitewides.

No use getting "thousands and sometimes hundreds of thousands of links" if they all point to the same URL. That's just asking to get "Google-slapped".

 

There should be a new word for that - sitewide usually refers to having the same link (automatically) put on all pages of a website.
Having a different link on all pages of a site is a different matter. Good for the receiving site, probably, not good for the site that has them though.

 

I don't know of any experiment done that validates the myth that site-wide links are "Good" or "Bad".

I keep hoping some energetic type does this and posts the results for each SE (top 4, G,Y!,M$,Ask).

Also length of time for the links on each. So you would need to show SERP results once a quarter for at least a year.

Great experiment. Need two sites of same topic and similarly on-page SEO'd and these two sites on difference class-c IP's and one goes for nothing but site-wides and the other only for home page, content, and deep links.

I just don't have the energy to set it all up and hunt for the links for each.

 

I believe they are seaching for web traffic. sitewides links may not help in pr but the slot show in every pages of the site.

 

i thing backlinks from directories with high homepage PR is very benifical for sites

 

I thought it was pretty interesting when I changed an aged sitewide link. the term that I changed it too saw a drop in ranking, rather peculiar if you ask me. Granted it wasnt a great "scientific" result but still a result none the less.