Site Wide Links are links that are present on every page of the website. You may often see some links like “contact us” page, “home” page , “products ” page linked from each and every page of the website, these links are more commonly referred to as “Site Wide Links”. However in seo terms, Site Wide Links are those links that are present on the footer or on the sidebar and it may link to popular inner pages of the site or to an external site. There is a difference between the menu or navigation Site Wide Links and footer or Sidebar links. The former has a lot of user significance associated with it and hence words like “home”, “products”, “contact us” , “About us” are used as “anchor text” ; but when it comes to Site Wide Links on footer and sidebar, webmasters focus to use their main promoted “keywords” as the anchor text while linking to web pages. This practice brings in lot of backlinks with the same “anchor text“. Before the Penguin update this practice was adopted by almost every search engine optimizer and it worked well but after the Penguin Update , this practice was taken negatively by Google and it started penalizing websites that had lots of Site Wide Links with the same anchor text.
Site Wide Links are still useful if you create them wisely. The key lies in anchor text variation and the popularity of the site which is providing the link. Now, only the number would not count but instead relevancy and popularity of links would also count. Hence, create blogroll links, footer links, sidebar links but make sure you take it from a popular and authority blog or website and make sure to change your anchor text often. Your backlink profile should look organic.
Also See:-
Top ways to get natural backlinks to your website
Top Seo ranking factors 2012
Seo Secrets
How to rank in Google
Google Disavow Links Tool
Are You Making Your Website Vulnerable To Future Google Updates
Battle of Ranking Continues
Link Baiting
