one of my main competitors is doing something (dunno what's it called) to cheat Google (and perhaps other search engines). basically, they have sitewide links with anchors such as web developer, software development, etc pointing to the index page. not sure how effective this proves to be (probably helps) but the fact that they are doing it, really tickles me as a competitor. also, if i were a regular visitor of that site, i'd be really put off to see that. would you?
how useful is it for me as a visitor of the site to have 5 footer links all taking me to the same page (main page)? those links are clearly meant to manipulate search engine's results. what would you call it?
Something tells me that Google is a bit smarter than that. I cannot imagine that text links to the page that the links are on or indexed as "backlinks" to the site. That would be a bit odd IMHO.
? why wouldn't those backlinks count. Many sites offer multiple links on one page linking to the homepage... It's not so spammy as you think, sad to say, there are much more notorious things out there...
Unfortunately there is a fine line between "SE Spam" and "SE Spam recognized by SE's as spam". I notice this alot with my competitors as well. For example: http://www.lingeriesexylingerie(dot)com/valentine.html. If you scroll down that page you'll see this: "Wording: Valentine's Day Lingerie Valentines Day Lingerie Valentine Day Lingerie Valentine's Lingerie Valentines Lingerie Valentine Lingerie Sexy Valentine's Day Lingerie Sexy Valentines Day Lingerie Sexy Valentine Day Lingerie Sexy Valentine's Lingerie Sexy Valentines Lingerie Sexy Valentine Lingerie Obvious SE spam, but it's working...
But to what extent is it working? Having read all the relevant white papers plus from experience I believe (and it makes sense from the 'voting' perspective) that multiple links from your own site to your own page are devalued. They are the exact same IP and they voted for themselves. Google must be simply (or almost) discarding the value of those. Up until late last year I used KW links in the footers of my sites but doubted its usefulness and got rid of it. No noticable impact on ranking at all. VS, when you say it's working, does that mean you see them rank for those words even without them having a reasonable number of external incoming back links as well?
I have to side with TOPS' here ... I have also seen a couple of websites doing it and in this day and age, I don't think it works any more.
I don't know that it is even possible to account for all the reason these links could be there. At least not from the perspective of a spiderbot. Any well designed site with decent navigation will have at least one link to the homepage on every single page. I would submit that getting credit for internal links is more getting credit for good web design, or at least an attempt at it. There's also the dynamic factor. If you look at a site like Axelis or Mari-Len.com you'll notice that almost every single internal link goes through /index.php. If G is going to penalize for that then me and every other php/perl/asp/etc. user on the web is screwed.
Depends on the site. I have one domain in particular I can point a link to my main page, index pages, or external site and it almost always gives a very nice ranking in google. I will admit sometimes it is short lived but I have a trick to fix that quick as well, sorry if it's cheating but i'm also not sharing that info Other domains however google will not do this with, if you however have a strong page with google it can and does help as long as you don't go over board. And by strong I don't mean pr