There are wild guesses and some informed arguments on whether site-wide or single home page links should be seeked for when you are building backlinks for your site.
These are some of the meats from ongoing discussions:
- If you aim to maximize your PR and direct referral traffic, site-wide links help you better.
- If your primary concern is SERP, obtaining home page links from relevant good sites is a better approach.
- If your site is new, securing site-wide links will help it get indexed quickly and deeply by search engines.
- A site-wide link on a site with thousands of pages may be flagged as keyword spamming by Google; MSN and Yahoo tend to be more tolerant to such linkage.
As a means to avoid being flagged as unnatural linkage patterns by Google, one tactic suggested by several SEO experts is, instead of getting a site-wide link, to place your link on a “pre-sell” page of a related website, which is linked to site-wide on that site. With the site-wide linkage, such a pre-sell page will be considered important within the site by search engines, and your link on that page will also be able to claim high weight from that site.
