Forum Moderators: open
[edited by: Marcia at 9:55 am (utc) on Sep. 29, 2003]
[edit reason] Specific not necessary - thanks! [/edit]
It hasn't seemed to be any problem so far, and all the search engines have to know it's a standard practice. There could be a problem with linking back and forth from all pages of both sites, but this way should be fine.
There could be a possibility of limiting the number of pages linking from one site to another being given credit for, but that would be more like disallowing.
I think sometimes when an issue like this comes up and it's not clear whether it might incur a penalty from the search engines or not it helps to think through whether the same linking practice would be employed on a web without search engine robots.
If a linking practice has a valid use for human readers, I suspect search engines are unlikely to penalise it.
eg. consider the webmaster who knows little or nothing of search engine optimisation. He might well write a site for a client and link all the pages back to his profile site - not because he wants SE robots to follow the link, he doesn't really know about that, he just wants human readers to know who built the site.
If the search engines started to penalise this, they would be moving their position from trying to keep their SERPS listings relevant and spam free to dictating how and why webpages should link to each other.
The bottom line is: Think about humans not robots.
not sure if this is a concern for bellrj, but from what I've read, will that not affect your PR? i.e. backlinks from non-similarly themed sites?
Themes and such have absolutely no relation to PR. PR is a function of PR, to put it simply.
How much does that help when it comes to PR?
That's trickier. IMHO, every link helps PR. But Marcia, who correctly pointed out the possibility that the links may be "disallowed", might tell you otherwise.
I buy links from high PR sites where the link appears on every single page of that site. If I do a "backlinks" search on GG, however, only one or two of those links will show. Does it mean that they are not counted at all? Or maybe for anchor text only but not PR? Or the other way around? Who knows? Who has the energy to figure it out?
My advice would be to, if at all possible, get the other party to link to different pages on your site from different pages on their site. (ie.: the linking wholy grail)
That may seem like an extravagant request, but the original poster spoke of having links on every single page, so making those all different links would not be such a leap. Unless the other site wants to put the links in an include (often the case for multiple html links).
We have links from all pages of our clients' sites - some of these sites have tens of thousands of pages - back to my homepage. There was no specific pagerank or google-related reason for this, it was being done even before i joined this company.
I have been several discussions on this and been occasionally worried too. I have faced no problems so far with all pages of my clients' linking back to me. My own site is ranking very well for my targeted keyphrases, as well as have a pagerank of 5 which hasn't been affected in any way.
I say, it has no negative effect at all. And most probably, no positive effect either - I haven't seen any.
I buy links from high PR sites where the link appears on every single page of that site. If I do a "backlinks" search on GG, however, only one or two of those links will show. Does it mean that they are not counted at all?
I have seen a site buying text links from two different themed PR6 sites and Google shows many pages from those two sites linking to that site.
