Beware: Site-wide links are bad for your new blog

This has been a widely debated topic in the Search Engine world with a lot of people taking either sides. Buying links is accepted by all as taboo, but there are a lot of people who believe that linking to other sites in their own portfolio is fine. If you are one of them who’s just done it recently, hurry up and remove them before Google indexes the site where you’ve placed the link!

Why, you ask? For the simple reason that I was on the receiving end of a partial penalty from Google for doing so. The links were that of a new website that I was developing, linked to from a well-established website of mine. The website that linked out is an authority site with all its pages having been indexed by Google, so the bad neighbourhood theory doesn’t apply here.

The Experience

It was rather harrowing as I didn’t know what caused the sudden disappearance of the site from the first result of Google to the 312th for my primary keywords (If you are wondering how I managed to get to the top spot although it was a new site, the area was very niche when I started out - its a rather hot topic now). Since its common to make a lot of changes when you are developing a new site, I couldn’t pin-point a reason as to what caused the sudden disappearance from the first page of the SERPs. I was relieved about one thing though - I knew it was a partial penalty as my website was still in Google’s index. Although it was the 312th result, it still was there. (To check if your blog is in the Google’s index, you can use the “site:” operator - if I were to check if this blog was in the index, I would type “site:iamkarthik.com” without the quotes of course.)

Initially, I attributed it to the aggressive directory submissions that I had done and decided to wait for a few days before I did anything - just in case Google put me back up after the dust settled, but no - that wasn’t happening. I went from one SEO forum to the other in search of answers and yes, I tried the Google Webmaster Groups too. Nobody I asked seem to know why, and most speculated that the initial excellent results may have been due to what is termed as the Sandbox Effect. But I was sure that wasn’t the case since it was hardly a week since it had been launched - too early to get caught in the Sandbox!

The Dilemma

There were so many factors to consider, such as the changes to the content, title, meta data and what not! Trust me, I was really up against the wall and absolutely clueless as to what caused the sudden drop in rankings. To top it off, the site was sitting pretty on top of both MSN and Yahoo - just that together they sent me a grand total of one visitor during the entire week while Google sent me visitors many times over. Getting back into the good books of Google was hence, a necessity.

The Solution

That was about the time I learned of possible harmful effects of having site-wide links pointing to new websites from other sites. To be honest, I didn’t really buy into this theory since you couldn’t possibly control which sites linked to you and in which way. For Google to de-value a site based on external links seemed absurd to me. Yet, when I didn’t have much else left to do, I decided to give this a shot. I removed the site-wide link (it was a footer link, if it matters) from my established website that was pointing to the new one. I let Google index the older website after the link was removed and checked on my new site’s keywords once I knew Google had crawled my old site. When I say this, it really doesn’t do justice to the emotions that swept through me - my new site was back on the first page of Google SERPs, that too as the very first result!

It was a very pleasant surprise, but shocking to a certain extent too. It dispelled all my notions about the value of external links pointing to websites - with all due respects, Google’s algorithm seemed to have been written by a fifth grader for all I knew. To have let a single site-wide footer link make an entire site disappear into the depths of its SERPs seemed absymally poor logic to me. While I was slightly concerned about the implications of this unsettling revelation, I was nothing short of ecstatic that I had finally got back to my rightful place in the SERPs.

While some of you may think it was pure co-incidence that it could have got back at the same time that I removed the link, I beg to differ because I was determined to find out what had caused this effect in the first place and was about to undo every change that I’d made, one by one. I’m very confident that no other changes were made other than removing the site-wide footer link.

The Conclusion

Once I had gotten over the euphoria though, I did some rational thinking as to what may have caused the problem. One reason could be that the two sites were on the same server, since they weren’t even on the same IP. All through the saga though, the older, authority site that actually linked out to the newer one was not penalized at all! That leads me to believe that only newer sites may be affected by site-wide links. You also see a lot of reputed sites holding good although they are linked to by other sites by way of site-wide links either on the sidebar or on the footer. Either way, it was a rather sour experience that I don’t intend to see being repeated - not for me and not for my readers.

So, the bottomline is that if you have a new blog, do not link to it by way of site-wide links! Believe me, this is one exercise you don’t want happening to you - its just not worth the risk. If you want to be a bit evil, you could test it on a competitor’s site if its new! I’ve not tested this with any other sites though, so this could be a one-off case.

If you think this was caused due to some other factor and that I was way off my handle, I’d love to hear from you in the comments!