Are sitewide links bad for SEO?

[mbulox]

I have 11 real estate sites and have had links from one to another for about 7 years but someone just suggested me to take them all out because I might get penalized or affected by penguin.

My main site was affected on July of 2012 and organic visits have dropped 43%...I've been working on many aspects of my SEO but it's been difficult to come back.

Any suggestions are very welcome, thanks

[ABK717]

Hi Matias. Now that it's been a few months, I was curious to see if you were able to get your traffic back. Let us know if there has been some progress and what actions helped cure the curse.

[mbulox]

Cody, what you explained is kind of similar to my situation, the 11 sites I have are all Real Estate sites and they contain different "area" information (because they cover different geographic areas) but they share the same database of properties for sale.

We do have set different search results pages to avoid showing the same properties on every site, but, there is a link to similar properties on each property page which eventually the crawler ends up indexing all properties within the database so when you mention ..."every site had the same products"... this could be a similar situation.

As of now, I am waiting to see what happens next with my rankings, I guess I am a little lost on how long will it take until some signals are reflected on the serps, any idea?

Cheers and thanks a lot for writing about your experience with this.

[MickEdwards]

"Also, the bounce rate on these referrals was over 50%, compared to a site average of around 20%, so the web visitors didn't enjoy it either."

That's a good point - how do visitor view the links.

[WhoWuddaThunk]

I've had websites get rid of penalties, with a lower case "p," just by getting rid of their site wide links.  When we got rid of the links the rankings jumped from the 100's up to the top 5.  When the site owner put the links back up the site dropped back into the 100's.  We went back and forth several times with the same effect, so I'm positive that it was related.

Just an FYI, we pushed to get rid of the links altogether because every site had the same products, and sending them to a different website made little sense.  Also, the bounce rate on these referrals was over 50%, compared to a site average of around 20%, so the web visitors didn't enjoy it either.

[mbulox]

Moosa,

Yes, the first thing I did was to remove all these links ...as of now, I am going through all my external links and cleaning some directory links that I had from many years ago which might seem spammy to penguin.

Really appreciate your comments, cheers

[mbulox]

Michael, these links were on the footer of each site. I think I was hit algorithmically because I haven't received any message from Google but like I said, my organic visits are down by 43% compared to last year.

Thanks a lot for your input, cheers

[MoosaHemani]

I have answered this kind of question before as well and I will stand on my point even today! Although they all are your website and may be linking them all on each other seems logical and user friendly to you but search engine will still find it questionable and might hit you by some penguin update.

In my opinion, try to remove links if it is possible for you (no-following is not an option in my opinion) and if not at least link to other website intelligently!

Let’s say you have 11 websites and each is targeting to different location so add a link where you are talking about some other location instead of adding them all in footer or sidebar!

Hope this helps!

[MickEdwards]

Generally speaking if you have site-wide do-follow  links (typically footer) I would switch to no-follow immediately. If you are purely inter linking your portfolio Google is likely to spot those links are there trying to game the system.

Even if those links are offering real value to the visitor I would set to no-follow, but the way you describe that does not appear to be their primary purpose.  What context and how do they appear on the page?

Also you say that you have been hit.  Was this a manual penalty or an algorithmic penalty?  So you are fighting the right fight have you compared your analytics with the algorithm history dates?