Forum Moderators: martinibuster
however the overall theme of the site linking to you might help over and above the PR factor
As the previous answer stated, the value of a link depends on the page, not the site.
How do you know that the page has a PR of zero? If it is from the Google toolbar it may be misleading, the PR shown for interior pages is not precise.
However, if it really is a PR zero page then the link will be pretty much worthless.
Dan, how about the rest of the site - is it also PR0, except for the homepage? And is the page that'll be linking to you part of a "directory" on the site that's all PR0?
>How can I verify if it's the correct PR?
There's no way to verify it exactly. If it's been up a while, you can assume it's reasonably close.
If it's brand new and not indexed yet, it's a toolbar guess. However, I just checked only two PR5 sites that each have pages that are brand new that haven't been indexed yet, and for those pages the toolbar guess is PR3 (based on the PR5 of the homepage most likely).
So the PR0 value back to you of that page you're looking at is highly questionable, and it's not impossible that it's one that's been penalized in recent months - some have had PR to the index page restored and internal pages still retain the PR0 penalty. Without any way to verify whether it's a penalty, and as of now no PR benefit back to you, I'd personally pass on it unless it would have tremendous value to site visitors. And even then, it might be wise to think twice, especially if your site is new with little to counter-balance linking into what could be a bad neighborhood.
Google doesn't counsel us which individual sites to link to or not, but we have been warned about linking into bad neighborhoods, and we've got enough information to be able to exercise caution, which I'd do in this case.
It's been stated that what others do can't hurt your site, but some express doubts about that. I wouldn't worry much about one link pointing to you, though unless there's a chance of a LOT of traffic coming through that link I wouldn't chance linking back.
Sure, the homepage has PR5 from the sites linking to it, but it's apparently not giving any back from that directory. That's the inequity of these situations, and often they're promoted by promising high rankings for link popularity.
Dan
