sitewide links, are they worth it?

I've seen people offering for sale sitewide links, a link to your website at the bottom of every page of their website.

Is this a good tactic or not? And what about site wide reciprocal link exchanges?

I had heard that if there was too much cross linking (to many reciprocal links between two sites) that they might be viewed as one big site by Google?

 

As far as I know sitewides have very little advantage over normal links in google. On msn it works great. No idea about yahoo.

 

site-wide links in general are normalling all good especially if the link is for the purpose of gaining traffic and not pr.

 

Plus they are offered a lot more because they are so easy to add if you use a template.

I agree that in regards to SEO for Google they have just a bit more value than a single link although Yahoo and MSN are different.

And, as Just-for mentioned, the ability to drive traffic is signifigantly greater

 

presumably the traffic would be less targted, and there for less useful?

 

We have about a half dozen sister sites that sell related items but all have unique content. We have site-wide links connecting the sites at the bottom of every page on every site. MSN loves us, Google doesn't show us and Yahoo seems to be looking on us less favorably. We are going to remove the static links altogether on one site and use javascript links instead. We're hoping that we'll get a boost in Yahoo from that and still let our customers move from site to site.

 

I wouldn't be linking that way. Thats signifigantly different from just a regular site wide and you are approaching something that could be penalized by the SEs

 

It cost me more time if you want to be on one specific page instead of site wide

 

stop using php includes

 

not 100% true. If you get a site-wide link on a site that has related content/ aim at similar age groups/cultures then a site wide link would be much better, since your link will be on 10's, 100's even 1000's of related pages.