Lots Of Links From One Site?

[petersa]

I am doing a little research on competitors in the industry of a website I am helping with a little link building SEO work. It seems that the main competitor has over 400 incoming links (I just query it in yahoo). On closer inspection it turns out that they have another site that they have created and put the a link in the footer.

My question is, does that link depreciate at all? The site has a PR of 4 which dilutes the further into the site you go.

Thanks

[stepho]

I really want to know the answer to this too.
If you have 200 site wide links pointing to your site from another, are these links actually worth anything?
Is it not true that Google will only pass PR from one link as all the links are from the same domain?

[Shaddows]

For google at least, I believe that strictly speaking, each URL has a 'vote' which gets divided by the number of OBLs on the page. This vote-value gets modified by such things as PR (real, not toolbar) and relevence. On this basis, each footer link counts. HOWEVER...

Two things.

1) Google 'reads' the page template and weights the (non-template) content more heavily than template. Or, to put it the other way, devalues the template.

2) If they have created the other site largely to point at their monetised site, this may look unnatural and be frowned upon. On the other hand, it may not. This is discussed in more detail here:
[webmasterworld.com...]

[petersa]

Thanks Shaddows.

Does this mean that if they have 390 out of 400 links pointing to their site from one external source that I would need less links that are of higher quality pointing to mine?

[Shaddows]

Almost certainly, yes. But quantification of how many is probably not possible, or at least worthy of an extended discussion ;)

High quality, diverse links are worth a lot more than high-volume 'spammy' ones.

[Lord Majestic]

If you have 200 site wide links pointing to your site from another, are these links actually worth anything?

Depends how valuable the pages on which those links are located. It seems logical that some kind of discount is applied for cases when too many backlinks come from same site - it is not known for sure though.

Is it not true that Google will only pass PR from one link as all the links are from the same domain?

That's not how PageRank works: in theory it will pass to all links, but in practice some limits could be used, only Google knows for sure.

[petersa]

Thanks for the help. I am now not 'too' worried about the competition!