There is no penalty it is simply that the first link is the important one and the rest are devalued. - Michael
Why would they be devalued??? Engines index pages, not websites. Don't just repeat what you have read everywhere.
Fryman, we both know who is spouting carp about sitewides and we both know what I think he is full of! I've gone out and picked up sitewides as a result of the comments, I've had a couple with 1,000s of pages for almost 3 weeks and a couple for a week. I've seen no movement whatsover up or down in my results yet. I've 'stuck' flitting between position 8 and 9 which is what I've been doing for the last 6 weeks or so anyway. I'm not adding more links because I want to see what happens here, and as soon as something happens, I'll let you know. It's sad that he has been allowed to repeat his opinion (and I don't just mean sitewides, there is this bloop thing too ) over and over and over as if it were fact. Which is why I'm no longer over there. Jane
fact: Matt cutts has said that text near the bottom of the page in small text is deemed less important. UNLESS: '"It is to a set of pages within the same domain, when we deem it as a sitemap and therefore has more importance". Sitewides tend to be in footers and in small text. I am not going to say one way or another, but there are the facts so draw your own conclusions Oh Bugger it lol I can't keep my opinion to myself lol IMO sitewides are ok, they are not equal to the sum of the individual pages though. There has been some speculation that google truncates value after a set threshold. I have not found this to be the case. What I CAN say with absolute conviction is that there will never be a penalty against a site for having a set of site wide links pointing to it. A search egine will NEVER penalise a site for something it (the site) can not control, as if it was to do so it would result in all out war, and the SERP's would be a battle ground as site after site has these tactics levied against it. There might be exceptions to this, ie same owner, same IP address. but again this is open to abuse, so I would say this is a long shot. Google often 'filters' and people often call this a 'penalty', which is wrong. being punished, penalised, hurt. because of an action, is not the same as not gaining any bebefit from those actions. Google rarely penalise anyone and if they do it is normally because of onpage factors, or offline marketing, (or a combination of both) 'Search King'! There you go I have opened my mouth again lol P.S. anyone using sitewide links as an main SEO factor should read up a little on Block level Link Analysis . Microsoft are seriously looking at this, and it 'might' be why their beta search SERP's seem cleaner. Put simply this is a system where each page is graphically split up into blocks, header, footer, right side, left side and core (centre) links are then graded based on what 'block' they sit in, wth links from within the core being deemed the most important.
That's not a clever thing to say. If you had said "What makes you think that?" you may have learned something - Michael
"Engines index pages, not websites" true engines index pages, but that alone is a thing of the past almost. Engines use clustering, and they understand the relationships between pages and sites. Google have said that quote: "page rank passes more freely across pages within a domain" to allow this, they have to understand the realtionship between page urls.