Many links from single site - good or bad

[LinkSeen]

I have several sites that have referral links to my site in their footer that is apparently on every page of their site. So I am getting hundreds and some times thousands of links from single sites. Is this a good thing, or does google see this as spamming.

[vrocks]

I have several sites that have referral links to my site in their footer that is apparently on every page of their site. So I am getting hundreds and some times thousands of links from single sites. Is this a good thing, or does google see this as spamming.

If the sites are blogs then it is the default behavior.

[StickyGreen]

It's probably okay......

[deejay]

I have a white label site with a webcam programme that had one link from every page to the index page of a directory. That showed over 100,000 external links to the director in Google Webmaster Tools. The link was removed and the directory's Google traffic has improved significantly by about 50% since the external links disappeared from Webmaster Tools. That process, however, took several months.

I also have dozens of white label dating sites, most of which link back to the primary site (some static html, some blogs). That doesn't appear to be a problem, possibly because it shows as one external link in Webmaster Tools.

The obvious conclusion is that site-wide links are fine up to a point, but where the threshhold lies is anyone's guess.

[thelema]

I have several sites that have referral links to my site in their footer that is apparently on every page of their site. So I am getting hundreds and some times thousands of links from single sites. Is this a good thing, or does google see this as spamming.

Lots of web development businesses place footer links to their websites in the templates they develop for their clients. While this could give you somewhat of a boost for a little while, it certainly won't last. Google takes a look at the position of a link on the page as one factor in determining how valuable that link is. As such, footer links typically aren't very valuable.

In addition to this, Google looks at link freshness. While losing an old link could cause you to lose some domain authority, that link's value will decay over time. Google wants to see that your content is still relevant, so generating new links regularly is important. The old links in the footers of those sites will eventually lose most of their value.

In my opinion, Google won't see those links as spam. After all, in theory you can't control what the owner of that site does. One of my clients at work is a major news organization with a universal footer across all of their websites. This footer is on every page of all of their sites and links to their four primary websites. They've been doing this for quite a while and no spam penalties have been applied to their site.

I'd be more concerned with the cost:benefit ratio of those links. Do you own the site that's doing the linking? If so, you are removing a fraction of the linking power of all the other links on your site for the minimal value of the footer link. Is that worth it to you? If you don't own the site, does it cost you anything in time/effort to keep those links in place? Is it worth it for the negligible boost?

If I were you, I'd focus on building a quality link portfolio via link trading with other adult sites with a fairly high domain authority.