Miamacs - 2:29 pm on Mar 18, 2007 (gmt 0)

It's an interesting issue with sitewides.
I don't know about link buying, but I've had some good and some bad experience with them between same ownership sites promoting this exact fact, same ownership.

From what I see the following parameters are at play:

- Are the pages you get the links relevant to the link text?
- Are they trusted?
- Is your site trusted?
- How many is too many? ( 300 is not. 3000 is. But where are the thresholds? )

If the answers are yes, yes, yes, and around 10-300, it's okay.
Otherwise they either got discounted or made the target site disappear for the phrase used, even if it was the company name.

A pretty reasonable measure is not to do them at all.

But.

While doing SEO for a pretty overpopulated theme, I noticed the competition paying for regular advertizing space on local online newspapers. Or the online version of the local newspapers, whatever. These newspaper sites were obviously well endorsed by sites with ultra-high trustrank ( I tracked their links too, and they were ) as being probably the only english language resources in the area that weren't the offspring of US or UK media.

The ads featured many links, some were banners ( image links ) some were text links, some java dropdowns, so most of them wouldn't even be seen by bots.

But the ads became sitewides, and stayed there for a very long term. Obviously long enough to pass enough "juice" with them to get the targets out of possible penalties that this spamlike linking structure would indicate.

And they rank top 3 for everything.

It goes to show this is a race between linking structure and relevancy related penalties, and the "juice" that's passed. There's an uneven balance though. So sitewides only work for and from the most trusted sites.

You don't need them.
A single top-level page link of recommendation gives almost the same results.