500,000 or 1 link

Run of site or just one link

[conor]

We have the opportunity to gain links form a very high trafficed (>1,000,000 visitors a day), very large (>500,000 pages indexed), site - which is generally on theme.

They have offered us run of site in the footer of every page ( where atleast 2 of our direct competitors are linked) but I am worried about tripping a filter as our site is pretty young and much newer than the compeitors.

Due to their site setup and CMS it is an all or nothing situation either one l link from the homepage or more than 500,000 links from every page.

My question is : which option to go for ? what are the pro's and con's?

[Lord Majestic]

I think it might be counter productive to get 500k backlinks - think about it from SE perspective - they will see so many backlinks from the same site, do you really think they would not consider that this site is somehow related to yours? I mean it's hard to do when you get 2-3, 10 or 50 backlinks from same site - but when you get 500k then it's pretty obvious.

This is thinking from SE ranking perspective - you might however gain real traffic from having a link to your site on each of the pages - probably not much if they are in footer, but from traffic (especially if it's relevant) it might be worthwhile going for 500k backlinks.

Why won't you ask to run a test for a few days to estimate traffic you'd get from 500k backlinks? Maybe use some other domain for the testing purposes to avoid SE picking up those backlinks too early.

[Crush]

I would take the sitewide if it is an old site.

[machine11]

The thing that would scare me is that by receiving 500000 incoming links, the % of your incoming anchor text for your keywords will probably be too high...

[Quadrille]

This worries me as much as the Overlink Flag:

"where atleast 2 of our direct competitors are linked"

Is there a risk of a bad neighborhood here?

[CainIV]

I would take the sitewide if it is an old site.

Crush, can we have your thoughts on why you would want the sitewides over the one page link. You have always had a different view of the way link building is done, and it is nice see some fresh perspective, not driven by common conjecture :)