Which is better for SEO? Getting a backlink from the home page from a site (which usually has the highest PR) or getting a backlink from home page + all other pages on the site (let's assume there are 10 pages on the site - 9 + the home page). The links would be in the footer of each page.
I suggest you to read the recent articles from Jordan Kasteler "Most Overlooked SEO Metric: Link Placement" and Ann Smarty "7 Myths and Educated Theories Behind Sitewide Links" about the SEO weight that is put on links in various places throughout a webpage, including footer links.
Thanks lawnchairlarry, I read those. It seems as though sitewide footer links are not effective at all for SEO.
Not entirely. Massive volumes of site-wide links from thousands & thousands of websites can overcome that theory. Take for example the copyright notices for forum or blogging software. The sheer brute force of this many links can 'persuade' otherwise. On the whole, and for the normal guys, site-wide links are definitely not worth as much as they used to be. Based on the same principals of section detection described in both of those articles, it is not a far stretch of the imagination that the SEs will be able to identify forum signatures & blog comments as well. Just another fly in the ointment for them to take care of.
Indeed, links from footers, forum signatures and blog comments have already been devalued by the major search-engines. It is not worth investing time and money in them, unless you get tons of them.
So do you think it would be better, from a search engine perspective, to have a footer link only from the home page of several sites, instead of site-wide footer links on several sites?
Strictly speaking, the more links, the better, but I think that the additional positive effect of the sitewide links (instead of a single link) is negligible. It's not only the link-placement and the number of links that are taken into account, but also the IP address. Multiple links from a single website (a single IP address) are given almost the same value as a single link. Think of it this way: if every link from a website (on one IP address) to another website (on another IP address) were counted and given the same value by the search-engine algorithms, then it would be very easy (too easy?) to get a top ranking for a webpage for a given keyword, wouldn't you say so? I think it shouldn't be too easy, otherwise professional SEO consultants would be out of a job.
Well, Larry, the term SEO is pretty much a dead acronym. If you use strong titles, proper heading tags, and have good copywriting skills -- you too can be a good SEO. And most SEOs do not even have link building services, outside of mass submissions to directories.