Filed under: Search Engine Marketing
In an interesting discussion at the SearchEngineWatch forums, Your Competition CAN Hurt Your Rankings In Google, member shazbot describes how his site tanked after he purchased some site-wide links from well-ranked sites. Of course, anecdotal evidence doesn’t mean much with search engine rankings - there are many things that could cause a rankings drop, such as an algorithm change that occurred around the time of the link addition.
A few other members joined the discussion with tales of how site-wide links from other sites negatively affected their performance, while others discounted the idea.
It seems likely that there is a real possibility that specific link activity could cause problems, although a blanket penalty for site-wide links seems very unlikely. Rather, it seems probably that site-wide links would suffer in two ways:
1) Their value would be discounted, if not set to zero, compared to other links.
2) They might be one of many flags for “SEO activity” or questionable practices; a site that accumulates too many of these may be algorithmically depressed in the rankings.
Why would such links be discounted? Google’s algorithm has always incorporated the premise that links are “votes” for the target site, and that the number and nature of these links help determine the ranking. This premise assumes that such links have occurred spontaneously because the target site has desirable content. Sitewide links are almost never generated in an organic or spontaneous manner. They are purchased as ads or text links, they are installed by self-promoting web developers on client sites, they are added by web hosts in return for free hosting, they are cross-promotion for sites with common ownership, etc. There are very few scenarios where site-wide links are added because one site owner was so impressed with the other site that he linked to it from every page. Hence, it would be logical to heavily discount these links; the collateral damage from such action woud be minimal, since most quality sites have plenty of links from many other sites. Loss of the value of links from one site would probably not be noticed.
The second possibility is more disturbing - could sitewide links actually “penalize” the target site? If so, that would mean that buying legitimate ads purely for traffic or branding reasons could cause a rankings drop. Even worse, as the thread title suggests, an unscrupulous competitor could add a quantity of site-wide links and cause a rankings drop for the target site.
Conventional wisdom, and Google public statements, have held that “what competitors do on other sites can’t hurt you.” SEO has always had its dirty tricks - in the early days, it was over-submitting a competitor’s site. Then came signing up the competitor in link farms, putting his URL in thousands of guest books, etc.
Google tried to sort this out by attempting to determine if the site was the perpetrator. Hence, having your site listed in a link farm might not penalize you, but if your site was listed AND you had the link farm pages on your site, you were presumed guilty. Guestbook spamming was handled largely by ignoring guestbooks completely.
In this context, how could site-wide inbound links hurt? I can imagine a few scenarios. First, Google has been known to look for unnatural anchor text. When links develop organically, the link text always varies. Sites will link to “General Motors”, “GM”, “www.gm.com”, “GM.com”, and many other variations. When a site pops up with virtually every link having the text “mesothelioma lawyer”, that looks suspicious. Adding a site-wide link (which will almost certainly have the same link text) on a site with thousands of pages could well trigger an anchor text flag.
Anchor text considerations aside, it is possible that adding sitewide links could be yet another flag for SEO and/or questionable practices. (It’s not clear if those are synonyms or merely related concepts in the mind of Google. 
) I’ve long believed that simple penalties are no longer common; rather, as a site accumulates flags, or points, it may reach the point where its rankings are degraded by the algorithm. What could other risk factors be? Obviously, Google doesn’t publish a list, but things that come to mind could be: competitive keywords, hidden domain ownership, questionable linkage patterns, links from SEO-friendly sites, etc. No single factor would cause a problem, but a preponderance of them might.
At the last Webmaster World of Search Conference, I lamented that AdBrite’s do-it-yourself text link ads were redirects rather than hard links; since most of their links are site-wide, though, perhaps those redirects are a good thing.
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