What are sitewide links?

Sitewide links are outbound links that appear multiple times throughout an entire web site or a section of a website. Typically these are links that appear in the footer, sidebar or navigation menu.

The LRT Sitewide Links Filter is a filter that removes a huge number of links from a certain domain to not skew the results.

A Sitewide Links filter reduces the number of links analyzed from a domain so that meaningful comparisons can be made.

The use of a Sitewide Links Filter shows that, for example, 10,000 links are not 10,000 times more powerful than a single link.

This method is called “normalizing” the dataset.

• Domain 2 linking with “Anchor 2” would give “Anchor 2” more weight than it should.
• Domain 4 linking with “Anchor 4” would give “Anchor 4” more weight than it should.
• Our goal is to always evenly balance the ratios in analysis, not SKEW it.

From experience we have found that a sitewide link has the same effect as 5 single links. Even if the sitewide link appears on 10,000 pages. By setting the Sitewide Links Filter = 5 the data is not skewed.

For the following backlink profile comparisons a Sitewide Links Filter = 5 gives the best results for:

• Deep Link Ratio
• Anchor Text Ratios
• Power*Trust
• Number of Ranking Keywords per Source Page
• Link Type
• Link Location
• Link Position
• Site Type
• Link Detox Risk calculation

In Link Detox, the filter is set to 5 by default. This means if you have a sitewide link from a domain, with e.g. a thousand sub-pages, the sitewide filter will remove 995 of those subpage-links from the report and keep only 5.

Therefore, we present more accurate insights from the link data we crawl.

Being linked a thousand times from thousand sub-pages simply doesn’t equate a thousand links. By showing and calculating the strongest 5 sub-pages for such sitewide links we weigh them in our calculation, but not to the extent as you find it in other tools where every single sub-page link is counted.

The sitewide link filter thereby results in lower absolute link counts as compared to other tools or huge link list uploads.

This reduction in links is to your advantage as you see a more realistic picture of your backlink profile.

In classic tools like QBL and BLP this filter can still be disabled, at the cost of longer processing and sometimes heavily skewed statistics.