My own experiments with website wide links have convinced me that Google does indeed punish website wide links. Why although, would this be a fair act?
I usually conduct link building experiments between the various sites that I control and one recently has been around the effects of so called so wide links. By using a single link from a PR3 web site I was able to move a PR0 website further up the search engine results, but when I put the same link on plenty of pages the PR0 site dropped down to below where it had been before the experiment began. And this was with 20 links detected on a site of thousands of pages, which has been in existence for around 4 years.
To decide why site wide links could be a problem, first let's look at why site wide links might be used. There are a variety of situations:
1) You own both websites and want to link to the other for further information
2) You have paid another web site owner to link to your own site
3) You designed the site and want credit for the work
4) You designed the template that the website is using
When you look through the list of impending causes of site wide links, it is a very limited collection of reasons and all basically because there is several sort of connection from the site with the links to the web site linked to. There are not really loads of reasons why an current web site may suddenly decide to place a link from every page of that website to another site. Especially not if that link is placed in the footer (as in my experiment) or in the side navigation, let's say in a Blogroll.
Now both of these are tried and tested techniques for gaining traffic. I use both on various sites for traffic exchange and see the traffic arriving. Such as, I have seen traffic jumping between my websites via the blogroll links and my site design business has had plenty of customers arrive who have seen and clicked on the link in the footer of another customer's web site.
But this is not what Google is trying to count when it is looking at links. It is a shame really that we are being penalised for placing links for visitors! However, there are ways about this detrimental effect as my experiment also discovered.
I found out that by blocking the links from the search engines on all but the home page, then the position of the PR0 web site did rise back again. It would appear that Google wants us to be honest on every link we place as to whether it is just for visitors, or whether we would like a few authority placed on the link.
So, why would Google be ignoring these site wide links - something that seemed to trigger with very few links? I suppose that it is because it is a way of identifying links just for search engines. Rapidly built links across the site are fake links, but odd links here and there are maybe for real.
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