Data or Examples of a Negative Impact of Sitewide Links
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Hi!
Does anyone have any data or examples that show a negative (or positive) impact from "too many" sitewide links?
Ahref's tool shows the ratio of sitewide links to non-sitewide links. I have seen a website with 97% sitewide links rank very well in a vertical while a website with 0% sitewide links also ranks very well.
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It much more depends form the quality of the site you get the site wide link. If this comes for example from Yahoo or Amazon or another trusted site it will never harm your site. But if you receive the same type of links from low quality sites it can be a big problem for quality of your site back link profile.
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Taking Andriy's point a little further, it also depends on the site being linked to. Since the sitewide incoming links are but one element, a good site with an otherwise great link profile could hold up pretty well against the burden of incoming sitewide links.
It would also depend on the area/terms of competition. In a highly competitive space, the burden of those links could harm a razor thin advantage just enough to make a difference. Of course, with all of that I'm talking about the algorithm and not a manual penalty problem, which is a totally different animal.
Best of luck!
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In most cases, Google sees a sitewide link as just a single vote for a site. "Too many sitewide links" really wouldn't be the issue. But, "too many domains with unnatural links" could cause a problem. Here's more on John Mueller talking about how sitewide links are treated by Google: