Linkspamming through references widget?

[5MMedia]

Dear Mozzers,

I have a question concerning a references widget. Im not sure if this should be seen as linkspamming.

The reason im asking this is when i check out some linkdata one referring site pops up 100's of times because they've put a widget on their site showing clients they worked with in slideshow form.

How is this handled by Google. Do they consider this spamming or do they just see this as one link? Im just curious how damaging this could be or how beneficial and what to hold in mind regarding these situations.

Thx!

Sander

[mrdavidingram]

Hi Sander,

Sitewide links, although not hugely popular with Google, do appear naturally in the link profile of quite a large number of sites, and you're not going to suffer any spam issues if these types of links only appear in moderation.

If one referring domain is sending links from hundreds of pages, then you're not going to have any problems. It would only become an issue if an unnatural proportion of your overall link profile was being made up of these site-wide links, as that's not natural.

It also depends on the type of site you're running, it's quite natural for Bloggers to have a higher % of site-wide links as they tend to be linked to via blogrolls, however this same % would look unusual for an ecommerce site.

In terms of benefits; sadly you won't receive the same link benefit of receiving 100's of unique links, in fact you'll receive no-where near this benefit. Essentially, as the anchor text, placement and style of the link is the same across the site, I would treat them as a single link.

Hope that all makes sense.

David