Link on Every Wordpress Portion of My Site?

[USACarry]

I have a website that is pretty popular with good SEO rankings. Part of the site is ran with Wordpress (homepage, articles and static content pages), another part is the forums using vBulletin (probably 75-80% of the pages on the site) and I also have a directory using another software.

I have a new website and was going to add a link to it on my older site on the sidebar of Wordpress across all the Wordpress pages. Should I stay away from that or just put it on the homepage? The text is basically "Come check out the new {keyword} site at {SiteTitle}, by the founders of {OldSiteTitle}. I would have the keyword and sitetitle linked over to the new site.

Would I be hurting either site by doing this or should it be looked at as a natural link as I do own both of the sites and want to let people know about the new site.

[Chris.Menke]

Don't put the link on all the pages.  Put a link on the home page and on a few on other popular pages on the wordpress site and leave it at that.

[USACarry]

Ok, thanks.

[ThompsonPaul]

I'm going to suggest a different alternative: Do both.

That is to say, put the link on the home page as you suggested, but only link either the Site title or the keyword, not both. (And which will be determined by the brand/keyword mix of your overall link profile - don't want to overdo the keyword anchor text.) .

Then also add it to the sidebar, but no-index this sitewide version and only use one link. The second link would be superfluous anyway.

The thinking here is that the home page link is designed to legitimately offer some ranking influence across to  the new site. The sidebar links are not designed to (nor would they be effective for) sending link juice, but instead are designed for actual human eyeballs to send referral visitors to the related site. (This is assuming the new site is in some way related to the topic of the original site)

By no-following the site-wide sidebar link, you tell the search engines it's not on every page for manipulative purposes, but because it's potentially of use to the visitor- functioning much like a paid ad would, and protected by the no-follow in the same way..

Best of both worlds - some link juice from the home page link, and hopefully some referral traffic from the sidebar.

Does that make sense?

Paul