That Tiny Link on Every Page is Your Website’s Achilles Heel

Any link you place on every page of your website is leaking the life blood out of your site. Those are your website’s Achilles heel.
You say: Yeah, but what does that mean?
Achilles was a mythological figure who was utterly invincible. Achilles was washed in magic water as a babe by his mother in hopes that he’d become immortal. Except there was a leaf stuck to his heel. Later, he was brought down entirely because of the spot on his heel, the one place he wasn’t invulnerable. He had no idea it was leaking his life force out, and he died without understanding what had happened.
You and your company met with a designer, and that designer gave you several options. You chose a beautiful design, it was built out into a beautiful website, and you’re very happy with your website. It is a beautiful, indestructable thing. But from its very beginning, that site has a problem – there is a leaf stuck to its heel.
Every single page has a little link on it at the bottom that links out to your designer, or to your blogging software.
You say: Sure, but, doesn’t every site do this?
No. None of the sites I build do this. And if you take a look at most of the “opinion leader” sites on the web, they do not ever link out to one site on every page. Ever. And it is one thing that I will never do when building or redesigning a website.
Why? Because it’s very bad practice for a company website to link out to any other site on every page. As someone who both designs and optimizes sites, every time I redesign a website, I remove every site-wide link. Every single one.
You say: OK, but why is that bad practice?
Let’s say your website has 6 sections to it. And those sections have an average of 7 or 8 pages in them. that’s over 40 pages. If each of them link out to your designer’s site only once, it’s still 40+ times that you’re linking out to another website. Which tells the search engines… what? What does it say?
Well, unfortunately what it says is…
“This other site is where I want some of my traffic to go,” or…
“I’m trying to get everyone on every page of my site to go to this other website,” or…
“Every page of my site is a little bit about this other site.”
As if your website were nothing more than a portal to the other website or an affiliate of that other website.
Now imagine the worst case scenario. I’ve come across a company that simply cannot see why their link strategy is not resulting in business, in real traffic to their site, and why the search engines still see them as less than nothing, despite that they have a fantastic, indestructible ‘Achilles’ of a site.
I take a look around, and their website, which has 10 pages, has the following on every page, along the sidebars and at the bottom:

• A text link to the shopping cart software that the order page uses  (so you can buy that awesome cart, too),
• A text link to the blogging software that their events page uses (blogs are awesome, after all),
• An image link with a text link caption to their website designer (who made this pretty site, after all),
• An image link with a text link caption to the W3C  (Worldwide Web Consortium - to show off that the website is coded well),
• An image link to a Trust Verification firm, McAfee (because being trustworthy with money is a good thing),
• An image link with a text link caption to the Better Business Bureau – BBB – listing for them (showing off a good business rep).
• Since this site is also an affiliate of a bigger site with a searchable database, there is a link to search that database on every page (must make it super easy to start the process, after all).

Not too intrusive actually while you’re a visitor. Seems good to a visitor. The trustworthiness rating to a real human being would be GREAT. Wow! Lots of trust. Lots of reputability. And I can start buying things on any page. Nice!
But, this is a worst case scenario for a reason. This site is linking outside of itself ten times on every page. 10 outbound links on every page, multiplied by 10 pages. One hundred links to other websites on their website.
You say: OK, so if I can get all of them linking back to me, it’ll even it out, right?
Uhm, no. And certainly not equally.
Let’s run down that same list again, thinking about whether those websites that were linked out to will link back.

• The shopping cart company doesn’t list you on their site anywhere and won’t if you ask them.
• The blogging software website certainly won’t, either.
• OK, so the website designer will link to you once  in his gallery of sites if you ask him to. (That’s one link back to me!)
• The W3C sure won’t link back to you from their site.
• The McAfee Trust listing for your site contains a link to you. (That’s two links back to me!)
• Your Better Business Bureau listing contains a link to you. (That’s three links back to me!)
• The affiliate search link is not going to result in a link back to you.

OK, so you’re linking out 100 times to 3 links back. 100 is greater than 3, no matter how you slice it.
This site is leaking its life blood. Just like Achilles. Those links are sending visitors elsewhere 100 times for every 3 times that the site is set up to receive visitors in from other sites.
It’s not that simple, you say.
Of course it is not that simple to us humans. But, yes, it is that simple to a search engine. Give or take a little weighing that the search engine does to increase the worth of some links over others, it really is that simple. In the simplest of all possible terms, this website would have to  get 97 more links to them from other reputable sites to put themselves back at square zero.
Well, since they haven’t built up 100 reputable links in to them from others just yet, they lose. Because links on the web are a big popularity contest.
You Say: Why is this bad? All of these links I put on my site to other sites are there to show I’m reputable, have connections to trustworthy organizations and that my company is really great!
Each page is a communication. Just like a conversation is a verbal communication, your web page is a written communication. What if you walked up to someone, intent on selling them your widgets, and said this?
“Widgets. Widgets widgets. And blogging and shopping carts and website designers and trust me and I have a listed business and I’m on the web and I’m part of a big group.”
Does that water down your communication some? I’d say so. That’s what the people in this worst case scenario are doing, at least as far as the search engine can tell.
Now, with real people, real visitors coming to your site, these links are simply background, part of the shopping environment. As if they walked into your store and saw your lighting and the stonework and the cool tile floor and your business license on the wall, all impressive. Same with those good links. They show you are impressive.
But search engines are not people. They are incapable of recognizing the finer degrees of importance that a human immediately senses. No matter how smart they get, they still cannot do the single function of determining what is important and what isn’t with any degree of human-like capability.
To a search engine, every part of your page appears almost as important as every other part of your page. Links are equal to products are equal to product descriptions are equal to background text are equal to images are equal to everything else on the page. Or…
Link = product = page title = picture = page footer = a word of text = every other word of text
And so what the people in the worst case scenario are essentially saying to a search engine is:
“Widgets. Widgets and widgets and blogging and shopping carts and website designers and trust me and business listings and I’m on the web and I’m part of a bigger group.”
Sound familiar?
Machines are not capable of deciding which data is more important, of truly rational thought, despite that the designers of search engines have done their best to make search engines smarter. And they’re doing a great job, except that links will always be weighed as very important, because they are one of the best indicators of popularity.
A search engine believes that if I link to you, I trust you, or at least like you.
Now, there are ways to tell the search engines which links don’t matter, and there are ways to cut down those links to just the bare minimum needed to properly give credit where credit is due and to make your Achilles heel smaller and smaller until you can actually work with the results to bring traffic in to your site.
But if you’ve got the average website, you’re not doing these things. And you’re not alone.
Think of it this way. Is anyone else linking to your site on every page of their site? The answer is almost certainly no. Then, you should not be doing it either.