SEO Question - Site wide Links

[DuaneJackson]

As of the Jagger update it seems to be a Bad Thing to have site wide links coming in to your site.

Many of us developers/designers have a credit at the bottom of every page saying "designed by xyz ltd" that links to us.

In light of the Jagger update should we be revisiting all these sites and making sure this is only a link from the home page and not all pages?

[DarrenC]

Duane, I've not heard sitewide links are bad in light of the Jagger update. The only time I have heard sitewide links are causing problems is where;

Domain A is linking to all pages on Domain B
and Domain B is linking to all pages on Domain A

I've seen very little on the forums I frequent on the effects of Jagger on SEO - if you are aware of any articles discussing this I would appreciate it if you could tell me the URL's.

Darren

[DuaneJackson]

I'll try and dig out some URLs - there are a couple of newbies here on the forum, yourself included, who have gained my respect on SEO matters for talking a lot of sense - hopefully one of the others will be along to confirm/deny soon enough.

[mattk]

I think the general consesus of opinion is that the Jagger update has downgraded reciprocal links and upgraded one-way links.

I've not heard anything about sitew-ide links either, but it's would be an interesting thing to research.

[DuaneJackson]

There's certainly a lot of speculation out there on it: http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=jagger+%22site+wide%22

[mattk]

I think from all the speculation, the most likely is this:

Google wants us to spend money on Adwords

[DuaneJackson]

Well, aint that a surprise : )

They're treading a real tightrope there. If they don't keep the organic results useful becuase of them trying to increase revenue from adwords then they wont be #1 for much longer.

[mattk]

It's interesting. Recent anecdotal evidence from a few friends have said that although Google still drives the most traffic, other search engines are producing quality leads.

[DuaneJackson]

Same for us. Traffic from MSN and Yahoo converts at a much higher rate than that from Google.

The overture trafffic also seems to do better than adwords.

[Tin]

I agree with Matt in that it appears the Jagger update is pricipally about how Google now treats reciprocals but I think way before Jagger, reciprocals had 'had their day' so to speak and folk were realising that apart from the issue of PR transfer it was much better to gain one-way links instead.

As far as sitewides go my thoughts are that it's a matter of moderation plus a dose of Google luck as well. By Google luck I mean that whatever measures Google decides to implement at any given time it's often down to 'luck, good or bad' as to whether you come off better or worse.
We're all aware that Google sees 'comment tags, keyword abuse, guestbook spamming, link farms' etc etc as methods used by spammers to artificially inflate a sites ranking so we don't do it for fear of being penalised by Google but... they're still in the search results every day, try searching for anything related to porn or viagra for examples.
Google appears to have as many spam sites in it's index as non-spam ones so I can only conclude from this that Google can't actually 'control' spam but merely sends out warnings. These warnings sometimes cover the arena of links whereby Google stamps on a sufficient number of sites that folk start to mention it in forums etc, then they discover a similarity (in the case of Jagger it seems to be recips) and then folk react to that.
There's no doubt though, that there's lots of recip sites that haven't been hit by Jagger and probably will not notice the update.

Moderation ?
To my mind, a web designer who adds a link to each page of his/her clients website has no problem. It is after all, a copyright statement and I cannot see anyone being penalised as a result (guessing) :-).
I do however, see a potential problem if the site is large (dynamics in particular) and if the links are in the footer area as I think Google has got this one well sussed (sudden and unatural bunch of hrefs at the bottom of the code) must raise a flag, and if sufficient flags are raised bye bye.
But again, I know of clients who have loads of sitewides and don't get caught whilst others with only a few hundred do?

So if you stay in the 'middle of the road' and don't overdo things you should stay lucky.

If you must go for sitewides I'd suggest
* point the anchor text towards the home page for 60% of the links
* vary that anchor text by using a mix of related keywords
* point the other 40% to a variety of pages throughout the site
* use mixed anchor text pointing to those pages but do not use non relevant anchor text, only that which matches the topic of that particular page
* use the content area of a page instead of the footer area this looks far more natural
* above all, build the sitewides gradually.

Lastly, Good Luck :-)

Ray
(my new years resolution is to make shorter posts)

[AcornDomains.co.uk]

Same for us. Traffic from MSN and Yahoo converts at a much higher rate than that from Google.

The overture trafffic also seems to do better than adwords.

Interesting, I am wondering how you analyse this?

I have Advanced Web Statistics 6.4 (awstats) which is quite a common webstats package but it only shows me the percentage of traffic from each search engine, how do I know what the conversion rates are?

Thanks

Stats:

Google 66%
MSN 22.60%
Yahoo 5%
AOL 1.80%
Tiscali 1.10%
Ask Jeeves 0.90%
Unknown search engines 0.60%
Splut 0.50%
AOL (de) 0.20%
Dogpile 0.10%
Lycos 0.10%
T-Online 0.10%
AltaVista 0.10%

[DarrenC]

Thanks for the link Duane, I'll have a read of that in a minute. Ray, another excellent post - made a lot of sense what you are saying.

Matt, I agree - it makes sense that Google is going to put obsticles in the way because they want quality content, not sites ranking well, just because they have thousands of reciprocal link exchanges.

People will always link to quality content - one way. The way forward in my opinion is to write useful and interesting content, articles, etc and people will find this content and link to it. Providing you with one way links - I mentioned in another thread where a travel company interviewed me and linked to the site - people were interested in the content and this got me 400+ (and still climbing!) one way links.

Acorn, my stats are pretty much the same - the major shock for me is whilst MSN is climbing up on Google (still miles behind though) Yahoo is performing badly - I have #1 on Google and MSN and Yahoo for one keyword and the traffic from Yahoo is about 3% of what Google and MSN are referring.

Fingers in too many pies seems to be a good quote here :D

Darren