Are links from every page of a partners website to my website bad for seo?

[raghavkapur]

I have asked a partner website to link to my website in the Menu Bar. Which has resulted in a link to my website from every page of the partners website (Over 1000 Pages). The link is not a "nofollow" link, it is a regular link.

Can this have any negative effects in terms of SEO?

[stukerr]

Hey,

This WBF might be of some use:

http://www.seomoz.org/blog/whiteboard-friday-sitewide-reciprocal-and-directory-links

The one thing I would add is to make sure the anchor text is pretty natural, i.e. your brand term.

I have also seen it suggested to have one 'partners' page then sitewide link to this page and only have the one external link on this page.

All the best

[RebekahMay]

Sitewide links aren't great for SEO, but it probably won't really hurt you - and really only 1 link per domain is the highest valued - the rest are weighed differently.   How strong is your current link-profile?  Having sitewide links in the menu of another site may make the links appear as paid links - especially if you haven't built up a really strong backlink profile yet.

I would still err on the side of caution and suggest requesting your partner to link to you on their homepage somewhere instead of their menu.