I have a stupid question... I have one domain with over 5,000 pages indexed by google, and another domain that is hurting for backlinks... If I add a link to the second domain, from the first, on the footer so the link is included in every page, will it count as 5,000 backlinks? Thanks in advance for helping me try to understand the pagerank/links/seo world
yes , it will be counted as 5k backlinks but they will have lower weigths because of the same domain.
It will be a very good thing to do especially if both sites are related to each other. If you add links to the second site from all pages of the fisrt site, it will give the second site a boost in its back links. It will also help in PR of the second site.
rarely do u see ALL 5k indexed pages count as backlinks on Google. I don't understand why too, but doing a simple search using the 'link' command will tell u that. So its a good question and I'm interested to know too.....
The one Back link from the body, wrapped around the content and looking naturaly will give more weight than site-wide links in the footer.