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I have been asked to write a couple of short articles and a couple of links were promised in exchange but if the pages do not have any PR to transfer - is it worth it?
This is an much-discussed (probably being discussed now!) topic. My take is that you should ignore PR and decide whether the links are going to be useful to your site and visitors, regardless of Google.
(Oooh, got to be careful here...) The web is going to be around long after Google and PR are but memories of a day when search engines ruled the roost. I think the exposure for your writing and the links that visitors who like what you say will follow far outweight the PR consideration.
I hope this didn't come across as 'preachy' - it sounds like you have a valuable contribution to make to the web at large, and it would be a shame if you tempered this because of PR considerations.
Perhaps we should not judge a book by it's cover, er - PR. ;)
You will probably get direct click through traffic even if you do not get PR. I recently panned About.com as a dead directory in a forum. I was set straight by a SEO that told me that his listing in About drove lots of traffic. A young woman told me that she and all her friends love About as a place to start their searching.
And I used it recently to look for web builder recommendations. So I guess I was wrong in my assumption. :)
This is not so true for me now as it was a couple of years ago, but I used to use Google for specific/refined searches, and sites like about.com for searches where I wasn't exactly sure what I was looking for. I found that simple, human information was much more useful than a traditional search engine, where my ability as searcher plays as big a part as Google in finding the right result.
As for PageRank, that depends, too. About.com sites typically have a higher PageRank than comparable independent sites do, thanks to the size of the network and its use of crosslinking between subdomains. Whether a worthwhile amount of PR will be passed along to you depends on where the link is and on how many other links are on the page--just as on any other site.
One other thing to keep in mind: About.com uses an "outbound ad frame" above sites that it links to, which makes it harder for people to bookmark linked sites and may confuse novice Web users about whose site they're actually visiting. You can defeat such frames with "framebuster" code on your pages, but that may result in your About.com links being pulled. (Although About.com guides can disable such frames for specific links, they may be unwilling to do so unless your site is too important to ignore.)
A lot of sound advice and food for thought :)
Thank you all...
It will be interesting to see how much traffic I get from there. I do not want to rely on SE's and so always try and get us listed in directories and get some links on high traffic sites. This could be one of the best yet. Let's see...
I don't imagine it'll be huge traffic, as we are in a quite small market, but I'll let you know how it rates to other sites.
If you search for the most general 2 Keyword Phrase in our area, the About page comes up No.4, so I imagine it gets a LOT of traffic. I'll check back in a week or so.
...I discovered that most of the pages I looked at in the form htt*://anysubject.about.com/ and their siblings have a greyed out PR on the Google tool bar...
Re: PR of About.com sites.
I just checked the baseball page and it shows a PR of 7.
I have a link to an internal page of my site on About.com When you click on the link to my site from their page, the PR of the page with the About.com frame on the very top with my page underneath is actually a lower PR than the PR of my page if you were to view it without About.com's frame.
It will be interesting to see how much traffic I get from there. I do not want to rely on SE's and so always try and get us listed in directories and get some links on high traffic sites. This could be one of the best yet. Let's see...
I don't think I've ever had more than 8 or 10 About.com referrals a day, compared to three or four thosand from Google. Even when I was an About.com "guide," I didn't get a whole lot of referrals from About.com's navigation links or internal search--not even when my site was featured on About.com's home page! My best sources of referrals were always search engines: Infoseek and Altavista in the old days, and Google later on.
There are two reasons why About.com links may not be as productive as Webmasters might expect them to be:
1) About.com's traffic isn't as significant as many people think it is. Webmasters need to remember that About.com's MediaMetrix ratings are for Primedia/About.com "properties," not just for About.com "guidesites." Those properties include all kinds of sites, ranging from Primedia magazine sites to AllExperts.com. In the past, they've even included third-party Luna Network sites (i.e., advertising-network affiliates) that have authorized MediaMetrix to count their traffic as About.com traffic.
2) A relatively small number of About.com guidesites produce a disproportionate amount of the network's traffic. If you can obtain a prominent link from a high-volume About.com site like Pregnancy or Knitting or Urban Legends, the link may produce a fair amount of traffic. But any site that isn't in About.com's top 25 or 50 isn't likely to send a lot of traffic your way. (This shortcoming isn't limited to About.com, BTW. A link in a middle- or lower-tier Yahoo or DMOZ category isn't likely to overwhelm you with traffic, either. If you're looking for referrals, the best strategy is to have lots of pages that can serve as points of entry in Google, MSN, and other search engines. Most users don't drill down through directories to find information; they just type keywords into Google or MSN Search. Still, directory listings--at About.com or anywhere else--are useful for the small amount of traffic that they do deliver and for transferring Google PageRank.)
Because of your own bad experience with About (and I am sypathetic to that) I don't think you're being totally fair when you say only the Top 25-50 sites will drive anything for "significant traffic". That's simply not true, i would extend that to the Top 200.
but, the level of traffic that is valuable is all in the eye of the beholder. Sure, google will drive thousands of referrals, and that's great. But that's just plain search, and you know that sometimes people are looking for things within a context.
A well placed article or link on an About site can definitely help reach your target audience & provide some significanty credibility. For example, I had a small HR industry site get About links to a VERY specific article they wrote, and it drove HUNDREDS of referrals to their site for months - that was significant to them. And the HR site isn't a top 50 site.
And of course I know that sites/companies I link to are VERY happy to get traffic from my site during peak season.
I don't think you're being totally fair when you say only the Top 25-50 sites will drive anything for "significant traffic". That's simply not true, i would extend that to the Top 200.
That hasn't been my experience, and I either have or have had links from some of About.com's higher-traffic sites. IMHO, the biggest benefit of a link from an About.com site is PageRank.
I should add that About.com isn't alone in delivering less traffic than the popularity of its brand name might suggest. I received a Forbes "Best of the Web" award this spring, and it hasn't delivered more than a trickle of extra traffic--but those two links from PR6 pages at Forbes.com should be useful contributors of PageRank.
