SEO Junkie

I just came across a thread at SERoundtable forums where the moderators first discussed the topic about the value of site wide links and then branched it out to the general members. The topic has been broken down into:

1. Do site wide links help for Google, Yahoo, MSN, Ask.com?
2. Future & Present issues
3. Usability side of things

Randfish, one of the SERoundtable moderators pointed out:

In terms of link value, it’s my general belief that with a few notable exceptions (Wikipedia, Yahoo!, MSNBC, possibly DMOZ), the value of 5-10 links is near the maximum value you can get in terms of rank-boosting power (”Google Juice”). Moving up to 100 or 1000 links probably will not significantly impact your site’s rank, IMO.

Another moderator dazzlindonna said:

I’ve never come across a case where sitewides HURT. They may not help much in some instances, but so far, I haven’t experienced a reason to actually remove any. Having said that, and with the understanding that I have not run extensive tests, I’ll say that it seems as though sitewides help a lot with MSN, some with Yahoo, little with Google. No idea about Ask.

Phoenix (who is my personal favorite ;)) made some good points:

Generally, Google seems to have caught on to the site wide linking approach earlier on then most engines. Yahoo is a bit slow, and MSN is even slower, and in Ask they seem to have no effect in my experience. There has been a bountiful amount of discussion on this in the past. Effectively I would count a site wide link on an entire site as one large link. The best approach I think is rather instead of a site wide link a webmaster should approach a website by targeting individual pages and taking a slower more covert approach to obtaining links. I don’t mean hide links, but do your linking in a way that appears more natural. Place links here and there. This would thus make it more difficult to determine patterns in your approach.

Also, rustybrick pointed out a related thread at Cre8asite Forums titled Is there any conclusion with sitewides where Ammon said:

Site-wide links seem far more likely to be ignored or down-valued. I’m basing that on what I have seen generally, rather than on a specific empirical test.

The discussion is still going on and worth taking a look at.