Site wide links - good or bad?

Hi,
I have found several POPULAR photographer's sites with many backlinks. When I researched them in ahrefs it appeared that most of their links are site-wide crap links. And yet they rank #1 for a lot of things. How comes? Can I replicate this for my site and be good?

One example has 15K backlinks with 11K coming from some noname site without even anchor term and few more thousands from various blogspot sitewide links.

Another example is bigger - 450K links. 33K from one blog, 20K from another blog etc. All site wides!

Because it might be common in that niche. Sitewide links are nothing too amazing and do not bring any more power than a single link, but even if you reduced those sitewide links to "one" link from that particular domain, they would most likely still rank where they are ranking.

@Nargil and others, if you had the option of putting a site wide link on a web 2.0 vs a single backlink on a post on homepage, which one would you do?

fb3003 said:

@Nargil and others, if you had the option of putting a site wide link on a web 2.0 vs a single backlink on a post on homepage, which one would you do?

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Always one link. Avoid sitewide links if you can. You won't get any additional benefit and only complicate your anchors.

Nargil said:

Always one link. Avoid sitewide links if you can. You won't get any additional benefit and only complicate your anchors.

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as always thank you