Sitewide links (please help)

[kevinbp]

Is there a tool in MOZpro where i can check my sitewide links?

Is there any helpful articles regarding sitewide links? Im confuse about (1) how to detect sitewide links (2) are they harmful or not (3) how to remove them.

Sample Scenario
I have 5 websites (www.sample.com) targeting 5 different counties
www.samplecn.com (china)
www.sampleny.com (new york)
www.samplekr.com (korea)
www.samplejp.com (japan)
www.samplesg.com (singapore)

On each website i have a flag logo on every single page/ header allowing users to select the other websites. After 4 months, i end up with 200,000 backlinks from all the other 4 websites

Why am i worried: I find myself ranking #1 for a lot of the keywords for the 4th months straight now without doing much SEO optimization. And there are alot of websites below me which have better and more informative site than me. Should i be worried? am i doing something called "sitewide links"?

[Ray-pp]

Hi kevinbp,

I'm not sure there is a tool in Mozpro to identify sitewide links, but we can use two other tools to help with that fairly easily.

https://ahrefs.com

Ahrefs has a neat link tool and does break out sitewide links. If you plugin your domain into the report, then go to 'Inbound Links,' and click on 'Sitewide' you will see a list of URLs that include a sitewide link to your domain.

Google Webmaster Tools

I like to use GWT to help identify internal sitewide links. You can view internal links in the Search Traffic > Internal Links report. Generally, pages with very high link count have sitewide internal links pointing to them.

Screaming Frog SEO Spider

A must have tool for SEO analysis. You can crawl your site with this spider and get link counts. Similar to the GWT report above, you can identify pages that have/use sitewide links by viewing the amount of links that are inbound to specific pages.

[gfiorelli1]

Open Site Explorer can show you if your site has sitewide backlinks, but I would not rely only on OSE for a link analysis of that kind, because the total amount of URLs its crawls in not the biggest one around.

As Ray-pp you can use also other tools like Ahrefs or Majestic SEO (or Cognitive SEO, which is particularly effective when it comes to link analysis), but I would always start from the "incoming links" page of Google Webmaster Tools.

To answer to your first question (how to detect sitewide links): sitewide links are very easy to detect. If you see that a domain is linking to yours with hundreds or even thousands backlinks, that is because they are sitewide links, or - classifying them - a single link published in a website element that repeated as it in every page of a site (i.e.: footer, sidebar, header).

In the specific case of your sites, the interlinking due to the "flag" menu is a classic. Normally they should not represent a problem, because Google recognizes they are systemic to certain kind of web design for multi-country or multilingual websites.

On the other hand, though, Matt Cutts once suggested that a better solution would be creating a country selector page reachable via internal linking from the header or the footer, so to avoid the creation of an always increasing number of sitewide sitelinks.