Devaluation of Site Wide Links?

A recent thread (hat tip to Barry) discusses the possible devaluation of site wide links.  A "site wide" link is simply a link that appears on ALL pages of a website.  A couple of years ago the search engines treated site wide links much different than most do today.

In 2003 and 2004 it seemed that a site wide link on a 1000 page site counted for many links and could very quickly bounce you to the top of many keyword searches.  Today is a much different story as many believe site wide links have been reduced to count as "one" link and not as multiple links.  Let’s look at the benefits and drawbacks of site wide links:

Benefits

• Your link on all pages of a website gives you a better chance to draw clicks and traffic to your website.

• Your link on all pages still seems to give you some extra weight in MSN rankings.

• Having site wide links can make it more difficult for competitors to analyze your backlinks as they are mixed into your backlink reports.  (yes there are ways around this ie a yahoo link: search with "-site:sitewidelinkurlhere.com" but many of your competitors don’t know this or won’t go through the trouble).

Drawbacks

• A site wide link seems to be counted as just a single link so why pay for a site wide link when you only get credit for "one link"?

• Site wide links usually happen in commercial settings and not "naturally" (don’t mind me blogrolls) so engines may discount them even further in the future.

• A site wide link stands out like a sore thumb when competitors check your backlinks and could flag your site as having un natural links as single page links seem more natural.

My advice…

Take any "natural" site wides you get and be thankful you have something worth linking to but when it comes to buying links, buy single page links.  They are more under the radar and a safer play for passing on value to your site for the longer term.