What is your opinion? Do you believe that the more links pointing to your site give you higher search positions? I am referring to sitewide links. For example you have sitewide links from 4 sites with 10,000 pages each so you have 40,000 links. Or you have one link from the homepage of each of these same 4 sites so you have 4 links. Would it make a difference? Is each link from the same site counted only one time meaning one link per site counted no matter how many links you have from that site?
Remember, a link to your site is akin to a vote. So having sitewide links would have some sort of limited impact not like 10,000 votes from the same site. It is much better to have links from a variety of related sites. But sidewide links are ok, they just don't carry the same SEO weight as individual links from different domains.
I prefer to get related links instead of site wide links. Google seems to discount site wides and as a result is probably discounting the 5 or 10 links that would boost my SERPs on the other site. So instead of putting up 10k links put up 5 or 10 to your most important landing pages from related content. Put the links somewhere users will click on them and it will help your referral traffic and keep your site visitors inside your network of sites.
I like to merge quantity and quality. I actually build links to my links in order to insure that I am getting links that are both cached and have a bit of juice. Oh, and not a fan of site wide links either.
Sitewide links are comparatively less effective for SEO. I'd go for quality, quantity can't even second that.
In the past I have always just gone for quantity, as a lot of the terms I target are niche so it's hard trying to get more than 5 or so relevant links... Quantity has always worked for me though, maybe it would take less links if the links were of good quality... but i have never seen any evidence to back that.
From personal experience I can tell you without a doubt that QUALITY is better than QUANTITY... I have a website that got a link from a major US news website (can't remember which one) and when my site was reindexed in Google it put my website up to 16th position on a major keyphrase that I am trying to rank on. This website has/had 1000+ links from various website and sat at position 30-60 on this phrase. It boosted the rank so much but shortly after the news website changed the link to another website (grrr and they were referring to our material as well - not right by them!) so we lost our link and the website jumped back up to ~35 position again. So 1000 links left a website on position 30-60. 1 link made it get to position 16. Loss of link put it back to ~35. That my friends is the power of one good quality link!
What if the site that has 10000 links to offer me has a pr 6 front page and the rest of the 10000 pages are between 2-5 pr? It is an extremely revelavant site in my niche also. I am not interested in high pr for my site but high search positions.
quality is much better. I've done real life examples and search "why that site with 50 links beat my sites with 1000". Plus, if you have to ask it, you know deep down, quality is better.
Just dispel the notion anyway and concentrate on building backlinks coming from different sites and that should provide you with the most benefit. Don't get swayed away assuming that 4 sites with 10,000 pages should give you 40,000 links and thus should give you a higher search engine ranking.
A reasonable quantity of quality backlinks are necessary to get top results. (and search positions doesn't only depend on backlinks).
Quality is certainly better than quantity. If you have long term plan than nothing but quality will last. It is true everywhere. and it is true here also.
Thank you all for your excellent comments. Can you please give your opinion on my second post in this thread: "What if the site that has 10000 links to offer me has a pr 6 front page and the rest of the 10000 pages are between 2-5 pr? It is an extremely revelavant site in my niche also. I am not interested in high pr for my site but high search positions"
In most of the niches where competition is high you will need both quality and quantity Relevant sitewide links especially from sites with many high PR internal pages will help, no doubt about that.