what's better, links from every page on a site or just the homepage

would the same link on all pages count less?

[knotworking]

I've just begun maintaining a third party website that has a fairly high page rank across all pages. The third party would allow me to place any kind of link from thier site at the bottom of the pages, something like "site kept up by www.mylink.com"

Question is, what do you think carries more weight with SEs, the same link from all pages or one from the homepage (or phrased differently, do SEs discount a link value if it is the same on everypage)?

I can't shake the feeling that the same link on all pages would be discounted. If I used PHP to randomly change the link on each page, would that be of any use?

[aris1970]

IF the third party site is very relevant to your site, I would place ONLY a link from the home page, avoiding putting it at the bottom of the page.

IF the third party site is NOT relevant to your site, I would place a link at the bottom of each page to an internal page that will be optimized for your topic and with your keywords and have there a direct link to your site.

I always avoid linking every page of siteA to siteB as I don't think there is much gain in terms of SE while there is a risk of penalty.

[knotworking]

Interesting, I never thought about including an outside page linking back to my site. I've been fooling with the idea of starting a blog, maybe that would be the way to go.

I often wonder about relevance when it comes to my field. I'm in marketing so, just about everything seems relevant at times.

[prom]

Interesting, how similar this question is to one I posed to Mike Grehan during a linking session at WW in New Orleans.

I asked him if he would choose a sitewide link over a a single page link, and he replied that he would choose a single page link.

[CygnusX1]

I always set up my webpages using a single link, with other links on the inside pages as well.

[knotworking]

That's kindof what I was thinking. With the intellegence of the algos, I figured they would discount a link on every page.

It's frustrating since, there are lots of pages on this site I could benefit from. I might just search out 2 or 3 very relevant pages in the batch and place a link on them.

[aris1970]

I might just search out 2 or 3 very relevant pages in the batch and place a link on them.

Tip: Link to different URLs of your site if you put more than 1 link (i.e. one to your home page and another with different anchor text to a deep link of your site).

[knotworking]

yup, used that linking to different pages tactic before on another site I was maintaining, worked well while it lasted. Problem here is that I can't get very creative, I don't want to draw too much attention to the links.

They are fine with a standardized link so, what I think I am going to do is create a graphic in photoshop that I place on most pages without linking it. Then I'll use CSS to try and mimic the graphic (this is one time IE works better than Firefox or the like, you can use the px setting for fonts to prevent resizing). It won't be identical cross-browser but, shouldn't be too noticable.

[leadegroot]

I too would avoid linking from every page.
Possibly a single prime link from the home page.
Definitely an internal page talking all about me and what I did/do for the site.
Fine to link to the internal page from every page, although I tend to try and be more subtle than that - unless you are doing a complete freebie, its a little tacky!

Putting an internal page all about you that links to your site also means that the page that links to you is more on theme with your site.

[knotworking]

leadegroot-

Very interesting. So, are you saying that if I placed a link on everypage to an internal page which there had the external link to my site, this would be more valuable than an external link on a few pages? Do you think it would be a big difference on a site with 100+ pages?

I think it would be acceptable to them, I could reason that it keeps viewers on their site rather than jumping to mine. I would imagine it would be best if I did not link anything else on that page other than my site; though, that would be a harder sell since there would only be the back button or my site link to get off that page.

[leadegroot]

Yep.
It pushes lovely gobs of pagerank onto that page so it is high ranking, and the page pointing at you is on theme (although obviously the site probably isn't)
possible downside: its possible to get the client site ranking higher for your site phrases than yours does - bit embarrassing! Shoemakers children and all that :)

I normally make the 'about our maintainer' page have the same look and feel as the rest of the site, so it matches, and make it part of the 'about this site' section - all the boring stuff, sitemap, contact us, privacy policy, about the webbie, etc :)

Sometimes its not right to link from all the pages, sometimes just from the category home pages.
It depends on the site.