Despite some cautionary words about sitewides being devalued in recent Google updates, I've yet to be convinced one way or another. Plenty of people still seem keen to buy sitewide links, and everyday I still see lots of IBLs in Google from sitewides in competitive keyword areas. I'm willing to accept that their value is not as high as it once was, but my guess is they still have some effect. If we accept that, then it's a case of how best to use them. I'd be interested in some feedback from those currently using them.
They help with PR but not as much in serps. Yahoo still loves them though The problem is that a bunch of external site wide links in the footer of a site just screams 'unnatural link'.
My feeling is that its the anchor text that can be your downfall. A whole heap of links pointing to your site with exacty the same phrase is really un-natural. My advice is to use the company name as anchor text in your sitewides.
It's all about reputation with Google. When your site gets indexed into Google, it began to build a reputation. For new sites, getting sitewide links is the best way to ensure never ranking good in Google since you create a bad reputation for your site. You might ask, why do some sites that rank high have sitewide links. My theory is that google saw them as reputable sites even before penalizing sitewide links and those sites were already using sitewide links prior. If you want to rank in msn and yahoo but don't care about google, sitewide links will help you get rankings possibly faster; however, any site, new or old, that begins to get sitewide links might see a drop in rankings in google after getting them. A big no no in my opinion. P.S. I believe the sandbox can be avoided, but the quickest way to get into the sandbox is to get sitewide links in my opinion. The sandbox isn't about age of your site. It's about reputation.
But as long as Google sees them as not in their own interests there is a possibility they are working towards ignoring them (or possibly even banning some sites with blatant & detectable massive sitewides to external sites). If Google isn't already discounting sitewides I believe it's only a matter of time.
My rule of thumb when doing anything related to SEO is this: is this something a search engine could decide to discount at some point in the future. In the case of sitewide links, this is something that isn't helping the search engines create better results. Consequently, whether or not they currently help rankings, I don't buy them. There's only so many hours in the day and personally, time is better spent on SEO techniques that aren't going to be subject to algo changes in the future.
I am new to this and I am sorry if this sounds too 'newbie' but what do you mean by sitewides? I have just started this new movie review site and I am looking for all the help I can get. http://suggestamovie.com
Sitewide links are links from every page in site a to a certain page in site b. For example, at the bottom of every page in this forum is a link to vbulletin.com. That is a sitewide link.
This doesn't sound like a theory... more like you caught yourself in a contradiction as you were posting then tried to validate.
I've noticed that older reputable sites that have quality content and sitewide links from say a news site will still rank high; however, I'd bet money that if you have a new site, and you get sitewide links, you WILL NOT rank in Google. If anyone wants to prove me wrong with an example, go right ahead. A site's reputation in the eyes of the google is very much a part of how it ranks. I've been independently researching patterns in google for the past 3 years. I know what I'm talking about.
I think they're valuable as long as there are not too many site-wides from multiple domains on the same IP.