martinibuster - 6:37 pm on Apr 11, 2011 (gmt 0)

I've evaluated the backlinks of sites with PR 5 and more and have found them lacking. Many of these sites that are selling links have their PR built almost exclusively with blogrolling, which is another word for reciprocal links. Very often these sites have crap traffic. What does it say about the quality of a site that has a PageRank of 5 and have crap for traffic? A lot.

If you want a quick and fairly accurate measure of a links worth then drop the URL into Quantcast and Google Trends for Websites. Forget Toolbar PageRank. The single best quicky measure of the worth of a site is traffic.

Quantcast is not accurate. However if a site has a reasonable amount of traffic it will show up on Quantcast and/or Google Trends for Websites.

In my opinion, a site that does not show traffic on these services, regardless of PageRank, has something wrong with it. Traffic is generally a sign that the search engines are referring traffic. This means the backlinks of that site have been approved. This means that the site is relevant for what it is supposed to be relevant for. Traffic is a sign of a healthy site.

Conversely, lack of traffic is a negative sign. It means the search engines are not referring traffic. Other than the lack of links, it may mean the search engines are not pleased with that site's backlinks. It may mean that the search engines regard the site as not relevant for the phrases and topics on that site. The lack of traffic may indicate it is a poor site to buy a link from because it is likely not to be able to help your site rank- regardless of PageRank.