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Now, this page with the link is PR7, so normally I'd expect a bit of a PR boost from this. However, two things are (possibly) working against me.
1) The page is almost entirely links - about 100. Does this mean there will be no PR at all coming my way, or just very little. Will 1/100th of PR7 make any difference?
2) The links are ordered by the number of clicks you've sent through - which means I'm currently at the bottom. Does position on the page make any difference to the amount of PR passed on?
If so, I could just probably just click through myself and jump up the page - I'd only need 40 to get into the top ten, and I get the impression the site owners have forgotten the page exists. There's certainly no automated checking for repeat clicks as I've already clicked twice and both have been accepted.
3) The third, and probably most crucial question is this: Why do I (and perhaps many others) spend so much time chasing PR instead of developing content?
Roddy
Please... remove the link from your site to theirs.
Google know about this kind of site and activly penalise sites that participate in them. Because of the number of links on the page there will be very little page rank passsed to you, and you stand a fairly large change of being banned.
The site in question will gain all it's page rank from the sites that link to it. This is a classic FFA page. FFA pages where designed to help the site running the FFA gain pagerank. The fact that all links are recipricol sends up the flags and can lead to action by Google.
Hope this helps.
Mack.
The site does not only gain PR from its links page - it runs a lot of text ads, gets frequent non-reciprocal links, etc. It is a major player in a niche market.
All sites on the links page are in the same niche (and so am I, otherwise I wouldn't have found it). It's a site I would be delighted to get a link from regardless of PR.
While Google may actively penalise sites that do this - they certainly aren't doing so VERY actively - this page is still PR7, the three links I checked on the page are all PR5, and are well-indexed. I don't know when the page started, but it's been long enough to attract over 200,000 page views.
I appreciate your comments though, and I did consider removing my link. I'll see what the next update brings.
Roddy
I think you can apply the rule that the bigger the infraction, the bigger the penalty. FFA pages are ridiculous, and are so treated. Several of these places have approached us with similar offers, and from clients that have gone for it (hook line and sinker, you might say), they have aceived similar results:
nothing.
A PR7 is a sweet thing to have and a terrible thing to lose. I would think at that point link integrity might be a higher priority.
As a suggestion, if you have good content, why not try to get something like an AOL keyword approval (another topic entirely).
To sum up, you can (and probably will) get dinged, and one point from a logarithmic scale that is already way up there is not really worth it in any mathematical sense. And for me, not in any ethical sense.
grant stevens
[edited by: engine at 7:48 am (utc) on Aug. 28, 2003]
[edit reason] No sigs, thanks. See TOS [webmasterworld.com] [/edit]
Are you sure? I tend to disagree - classic FFA pages don't ask for a reciprocal link. They make their bucks with selling/spam the email adress that you have to specify if you submit your site to their FFA list. At least that's how it was two years ago when my (ex) employee "promoted" one of my sites using "cutting edge" promotion techniques (... ffa).
However, i'd remove the link to them if i were you, roddy. It stinks, imho. Sounds like a classic link exchange programm designed to help the site running the exchange gain pagerank.
[edited by: Yidaki at 7:51 am (utc) on Aug. 28, 2003]
It's relevant. My site is about learning X, their site is software for using X on computers
> Sounds like a classic link exchange programm designed to help the site running the exchange gain pagerank.
I think its more about traffic than PR for them - they're based in a country where Google is nowhere near as important as it is elsewhere (though that has changed recently). Also, the more I think about it, the more I realise that the traffic the link brings may well be useful - I forgot about that in the initial excitement of having a PR7 link . . .
Roddy
Mack.
Congratulations on your PR7, nonetheless. I would be more than a little excited myself.
Does it? How does google know if the page is relevant or not? What if my site selling widgets links to their site selling 'acmecleaner' which may be used for cleaning widgets, but not always. i.e. the word widgets is not used on acmecleaner's site.
I have not seen any evidence of google penalising for non relevant sites.
This could be considered a FFA link - but one being run accidentally by very daft people.
I got the link in 5 minutes, with no vetting whatsoever. All I had to do was click through once, and I could now remove my link. They won't remove the link from their pages for 30 days - which means I could put the link on for 5 minutes a month, click it, and take it off again.
I don't think those running the site would even know what PR is to be honest, nor would they be aware that they are helping other people by passing on (possibly very small amounts) of PR. I really do think they do it for traffic only, and don't realise the dangers of potentially linking to bad neighbourhoods.
I am now considering removing the link, as
1) leaving it in offers no benefit to me - the link on their page will remain for the next 30 days regardless.
2) although all the other linked sites are relevant now, that could change tomorrow if some guy with a portfolio of dodgy sites happens across the page.
Roddy
there is no doubt that if i have a site about zebras and i link to a site about computers, its still going to count as an inbound link, and pass on PR.
if the site was related, of course i would get the benefit of surrounding text etc which would make it BETTER for relevancy.
but no INBOUND link can make PUNISH your site ..
if it did, id just link about 5000 adult domains to my competitors site and see if i could knock him off his perch!
regarding your link to them, it sounds like the classic "TOP LIST" type site you are in, recycling every 30 days etc ..
i would just do what you said, put the link up, make a click, sit there for the cycle and click it next month.
as someone said earlier, just make sure their inbound links to you are worth it and not a redirect link like ..
www.theirdomain.com/out.asp?site=45
and make sure you optimise your title link etc if their link is any good.
and the point about PR being distributed differently because you are further down the page, i dont think that could be correct.
anyway .. good luck with it.
we have had sites lose their page rankings (like 3 or 4 down to 1 or 0) for no other apparent reason than there were too many irrelevant links to it. This obviously takes the form of link farms not being counted in the tallying of backward links for a site, so I don't see how there isn't a possibility (working backwards) that those actually could count against you just as they can count in your favor.
All search engines score relevance in some sense of the word, adequately or poorly. I would think it an overly base assumption to think google does not do the same thing.
Developing content will also get you PR, although it will develop slower as people will have to discover your site first, then think it's good enough to link to, and finally actually do it.
/claus
If so , a list of definitions which are on one page would bring in a PR 1, but if i put 10 pages of single definitions, then i would gain PR 10 which i could manipulate to 'feed' PR into my index page?
Correct?
but no INBOUND link can make PUNISH your site ..
Although I agree with your general assumptions there are some exceptional cases in which an external inbound link can harm. But those are extremely rare cases :)
Google does actively penalize for non-relevant links
I would tend to disagree with this statement. As said by others how do you determine relevancy? Is relevancy determined by content? As far as FFA pages go linking back to them can harm you but again it depends on your web graph. HTH :)
look at it this way. goto google and search for the word "exit"
tell me the reason those few sites are ranking ..?
they are there because thousands upon thousands of adult sites that are NO WAY "relevent" to DISNEY have links on the front page like:
ENTER (index2) or EXIT (yahoo / disney etc)
if somehow irrelevance effected these links .. then i can tell you, you would NEVER find Yahoo or Disney in ANY search engine.
anyone else care to demonstrate some form of evidence to suggest otherwise ..
not just "i think it can because my site had too many irrelevant inbound links and i went from PR4 to PR0"
It has been stated publicly by google that they will/have removed the potential value of outgoing links (PR passing ability) on specific pages, including guestbook pages -- which we can likely presume to include any page that allows for an automated content/link addition.
How google determines which pages are to be devalued, we do not know. It could simply be hand edits, as they are not removing the value of PR passing for the domain as a whole, simply for the guestbook page itself.
It has also been stated that PR may still show in the toolbar for these sites, but that regardless, no pr is being passed by them.
I, and many others, are either unconvinced of the legitimacy of google's claims, or simply waiting for them to implement on a larger scale. There are still a number of domains ranking well off of little more than guestbook links.
However, I now have a genuine PR7 link, which should bring in both traffic and PR . . .
Roddy
I think this is all pretty bogus, but I figures that if I can't beat them I should join them, so I created my own directory site offering reciprocal links.
I hope my experiment works, I just got the website up and running last weekend.
It wouldbe too difficult for google to establish relevancy 100% - though they may have some sort of 'relevancy bonus' algo for links from sites which share keywords?
3) The third, and probably most crucial question is this: Why do I (and perhaps many others) spend so much time chasing PR instead of developing content?
In asking this question you already know the answer, forget PR, you need a little, yes, to help if you're working a link exchange program, other the content will build your relevance naturally.
let me give you some advice on being a real SEO... never build your foundation on what you think an engine wants to see, or by tricking it into thinking that it is seeing something that it isn't. That's because engines are smarter than you. Engines will out live any little bogus site you can think up. Sure, you might be able to fool one for 6 months or so, but you never want to look where the engines *are*, you want to look where the engines are *going*.
We all know the number one threat to any engine is SPAM (aka manipulation) ... so the thing you want to do is build a genuinely great site... if you really build a great site, sooner or later, the engines will be smart enough to figure that out... without counting kws on your page, or anything else you can easily manipulate. PR is not the 'end-all', its the 'beginning-of'... so you want to have a bunch of lousy sites link to you and then cloak your outgoing links, go right ahead. What are you going to do when they either read those links, or figure out those sites linking to you are just as lame as your site? Where you going to go then? You just wasted all your time on building something useless when you could have been building up a bunch of meaningful links and making your site more valuable to the surfer.
Remember when every seo cloaked? Remember how some split off from the 'ethical' crowd and started auto-generating pages? Remember how they all sat there and said 'I just dumped another 20k pages into that engine.' Remember how they made big money? well... most of them done now... washed up with nothing to show for it. At the time, it worked.... later it didn't.... and when it didn't, everything they had spent all their time and energy on was useless... just like those link farms will be in another year.
Engines are never going to stay the same and they will never get dumber than they are today.... you ought to keep that in mind when you play this game. If you are going to go down the wrong path, my only advice is, do it right... burn and loot and keep the cash in savings account or variable rate cd for that one day that when you wake up and realize you just took a massive hit.... but don't piss around on a small scale, because you will see no real benefit.
roddy, if you like that site, you think it is a good site, full of valuable information and resources.... so will the engines, if they don't already. I say, wrap yourself up with that thing.... link to it, get links off it, advertise if you can on the index.... make google think its your girlfriend and that you love it, and it loves you. You want play this game? then you need to not be afraid to call the ball, never hesitate, and play to win... because if you don't , your competition will eat your lunch.
I don't think it gets you banned, otherwise I would make a irrelavent site with 1000 duplicate pages and put my competitors link. I believe where google suspects something is wrong - it doesn't pass out any more PR from that particular site .. It's not that I have seen this, but sounds more logical than going around banning websites
