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Multiple reciprocal links from the one site!

Will this improve my page rank or be seen as google bait?

         

sleepy

10:52 pm on Jan 6, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Accidently posted this in another forum ...

I am in the process of launching a reciprocal links campaign and have discovered that I should be able to legitmately place multiple links on many of the larger sites I will be targeting. (ie one website that links to my site from up to 5 or 6 different webpages).

Will this improve my page rank or be seen as a negative by the google monster?

Thanks

steveb

7:57 am on Jan 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



"I have at least a hundred inbounds from one website and it isn't even a fraction as good as one link from about.com."

I don't understand people's need to try and confuse the new posters with obtuse nonsense.

"Hundreds of inbounds from one website" says nothing. One link from Nasa is better than 1000 porn links. Two links from Nasa is better than one.

It is simply dishonest or thoroughly uninformed to state otherwise.

martinibuster you seem to not even have a basic understanding of pagerank.

A link from the main page of webmasterworld, plus a link from the forum3 page will do more for your pagerank than a single link from the forum3 page or a single link from the main page.

antrat

7:59 am on Jan 7, 2004 (gmt 0)



LOL! That is pretty rich coming from the person who posted;

Authority and depth of content can add up to powerful Link Kung Fu.

lorenzinho2, let's do cocktails sometime. We live in the same neck of the woods. :) Y

I still believe you are wrong in saying it will not increase PR. The increase might be small, there might be better ways to increase PR, but it will increase PR.

The be brutally frank, neither you or I know the facts on this, we can only speculate and make educated guesses. With that in mind, to say "no" to something that you admit will not do any harm seems quite silly to me.

I'm also eager for your answer to

site X sais they will give you 10 links on 10 seperate pages of their one site. What would you say, "yes" or "no"

martinibuster

8:13 am on Jan 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



to say "no" to something that you admit will not do any harm seems quite silly to me.

Dude, I'm not telling him NOT to do it. I'm only answering his question:

1: It won't improve his pagerank
2: It won't trigger a google filter.

That is the topic of this thread and that is what I'm addressing. antrat, you are still off-topic.

I don't understand people's need to try and confuse the new posters with obtuse nonsense.

Sorry if you have a hard time following my statement. I'll spell it out for you:

Personal experience with multiple links from ONE website, and a link from about.com have taught me that the link from about.com has had such a strong effect that five months later I still rank in the top ten for a one word keyword phrase of my keyword, as well as for differing combinations.

The multiple links haven't done squat.

I am not trying to confuse anyone, I am sharing my personal experience.

[edited by: martinibuster at 8:43 am (utc) on Jan. 7, 2004]

steveb

8:21 am on Jan 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Pagerank is not about quantity. It's about quality. Quantity only matters *after* quality. 1000 web design links don't equal one from the Yahoo home page, but twenty PR6 links from pages on one domain are better than a single one of those PR6 links. The web design comment posted above betrays an apparent lack of any understanding of PR.

In the original question, pages that sleepy controls could get PR from six links, or instead get one link of those six. Those six links will transfer more PR, which sleepy can then redistribute any way he pleases throughout his site(s). This is elementary seo, an objective fact. The question of whether he'll be penalized is not as sure, but five or six is a very trivial amount and very common occurance.

Most every website has internal pages with links only from that domain. You can increase or decrease your own PR of those pages depending on whether you increase or decrease your links to those pages. But all links are not equal. A single link from an index page might be better than links from the rest of the domain's pages put together, or the opposite might be true. But it is always true that if you add more links to a page, the PR increases, sometimes microscopically, but it increases (with the rare exception of pages that Google doesn't pass any PR from under any circumstances).

Somebody wake doc_z...

steveb

8:30 am on Jan 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Okay martinibuster, perhaps you weren't trying to confuse. But...

"The multiple links haven't done squat."

This is a meaningless statement. *Where* are those multiple links from? What is their PR? Absent that information, the comment is thoroughly useless. If those multiple links were from the top five PR pages on NASA, or from the DMOZ main page, the about-us page, and tthree of the top level category pages, you would have a huge boost.

If you would have five links from about.com, you would do better than one link. That's it. The question is not one about.com link versus five from some porn site. All links are not equal. But the PR value of all links is cumulative.

Put another way... on one of my sites a page with a link off the PR6 main page will have a PR5... IF that is the only link to that page. If I links from my next four highest PR pages on this domain, this page will now have a PR6. Or, if I add links from several hundred of PR5 pages, that would also raise the sample page to PR6. Two different ways to do it, and both via multiple links from the same domain. No matter what though, if I add even ONE more link to point at that page, it will raise the PR a small amount.

===
"personal experience carries more weight over an opinion, and opinions are all you've offered."

I haven't written "opinion", I do this every day. And so does everybody else whether they know it or not. Everyone who makes links on domains changes PR.

martinibuster

8:46 am on Jan 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



>>This is a meaningless statement. *Where* are those multiple links from? What is their PR? Absent that information, the comment is thoroughly useless.

Ok, not too diplomatic but a valid request for clarification.

Where:
Topically relevant website of an offline magazine and television show.

PR:
5 and 4

They liked my website and linked from every page. No connection with me otherwise.

antrat

9:12 am on Jan 7, 2004 (gmt 0)



They liked my website and linked from every page

...and just how would you know if your PR went up or not? I can get over 100 links from PR5 and PR6 sites to one of my PR6 pages and not *see* any increase in PR. That however certainly does not mean it hasn't increased. Every little bit helps.

steveb

9:35 am on Jan 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



martinibuster, those links raised your PR, but... put it this way. If you have a PR6 site, you could get 100 PR4 links and your PR would not be noticably affected, BUT while 6.3548 and 6.3592 are not meaningfully different, they *are* different. One link from a PR7 about.com page would have far more an impact though.

Also, when talking about one domain, in many cases the index page is more powerful PR-wise than the rest of the domain put together... because the PR of the entire domain *comes from* the index page. If a domain has no external links to internal pages, the PR is entirely generated by the index page... so, additional links from that domain (likely) will offer minimal extra PR help (but minimal is more than zero). On the other hand, if a domain has many external links to internal pages, it would be possible for several internal pages to have PR similar to the index page, which means a single domain could easily deliver five equally powerful links. Again, if I linked from the main PR6 page of one of my sites to the main page of a new/virgin domain, I could make that page PR5, but if I added links from five of my other PR6 pages on my domain (or a couple hundred links from PR5 pages) this would raise that virgin domain's main page PR to PR6. (Note that these numbers are also coincidental... other PR6 pages might need to work with ten more PR6 pages to make a PR6 page; all PR6's are not equal.)

antrat

10:09 am on Jan 7, 2004 (gmt 0)



With all due respect Martinbuster, I do not think you fully understand PR. Hopefully SteveB's post will help you.

ChrisKud5

10:17 am on Jan 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



"With all due respect Martinbuster, I do not think you fully understand PR. Hopefully SteveB's post will help you."

I TOTALLY AGREE

Just becuase the little Googlebar does not light up more green does not mean PR has not changed.

rytis

10:53 am on Jan 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I do exchange multiple links for 2 years, and no negative effects so far. How much good it does, only google algo knows, I suspect, a lot.

Basically I write 2-4 KB unique article about my site, then select 5-8 phrases/words which I put into href and link to different pages of my site, each. Send this snippet of html to another webmaster who integrates it into his site template with menus etc, uploads and links from some place(s) on his site (all subject to negotiation). The other part does the same.

doc_z

11:37 am on Jan 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



I heard a wake-up call ...

...place multiple links ...
Will this improve my page rank

As far as I can say, this will improve you PR.

Of course, Google could filter out multiple links for PR calculation, but I haven't seen any hint for that. Apart from some (handmade) penalties [webmasterworld.com] which might be site/domain related, PR seems to be still purely page (structure) related. Thus multiple links improve PR even if you won't see any effect in the toolbar in most cases (as explained in msg #38).

Other off-page factors as anchor text might be handled differently in case of multiple links (multiple links are maybe devaluated). However, I won't see a negative effect even in this case.

Therefore, multiple links should improve your ranking score which might improve your ranking position.

I'm not sure, if you are referring to PR (PageRank) or the SERPs (page rank) if you mentioned 'page rank'.

shaadi

11:50 am on Jan 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



BTW, its IMdb.com, not IMBd.com

Christyl Stevens

12:36 pm on Jan 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Sorry if you have a hard time following my statement. I'll spell it out for you:

Personal experience with multiple links from ONE website, and a link from about.com have taught me that the link from about.com has had such a strong effect that five months later I still rank in the top ten for a one word keyword phrase of my keyword, as well as for differing combinations.

Hi martinibuster,

Just so that I can follow what you are talking about, can you help me by answering these questions, please?

1.) The link from about.com that you speak of, does it rank your page in the top ten for a one word keyword phrase BECAUSE the one word keyword is the only text in the link or are there more keywords in the link text?

2.) Or does the link from about.com rank your page in the top ten BECAUSE it is from a high PageRank page and does NOT contain your keyword?

3.) Or will you please explain to me in your own words why that one link from about.com ranks your page in the top ten?

TIA

sleepy

3:10 pm on Jan 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



Thanks for all the interesting comments.

Most of the sites I am hoping to get multiple links from are .edu or .gov sites that already have a page rank of 6 to 8. One of my main competitors has done this and has a page rank of 8 and has 500+ links. So will only be targeting quality sites.

The main reason initally for wanting multiple links is for increasing traffic not nec improved page rank but because I am starting a new site Im also looking at ways to increase the odds of me getting near my main competitor in Search Engines yet not be penalised by google.

And how realistic is it to aim for a PR8 over time?

martinibuster

3:41 pm on Jan 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Administrator 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



Just becuase the little Googlebar does not light up more green does not mean PR has not changed.

See post #19, where I give the example of web design links. TO make it easy for you I'l recap:

If multiple links from one domain gave you a strong boost then you'd see web design firms dominating the serps with PR eights. But they don't. When you browse the web design categories in the dmoz directory you will find the highest PR is Six for many of them. Very weak.

can you help me by answering these questions, please?

No. That's about one degree too personal. I'm not here to discuss the specifics of my own projects in the general public.

As far as what side of this issue I'm taking, I feel better being on the same side as WebGuerrilla.

The large and noticeable PR boost is no longer there.

If you're splitting hairs over a "microscopic" boost that may or may not be there... Who cares?

[edited by: martinibuster at 6:26 pm (utc) on Jan. 7, 2004]

Kirby

4:58 pm on Jan 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



Based on my own experience with this, I agree with steveb. It will increase PR. I can give concrete examples. My question goes to the issue sleepy mentioned about these being reciprocal links. What happens if you then crosslink these sites? I assume that WG and martini feel that G ignores or discounts them. Steveb, do you think google penalizes, filters or discounts these if they are crosslinked?

<kirby edited for typos>

ChrisKud5

8:16 pm on Jan 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



martinbuster- "If multiple links from one domain gave you a strong boost then you'd see web design firms dominating the serps with PR eights. But they don't. When you browse the web design categories in the dmoz directory you will find the highest PR is Six for many of them. Very weak. "
Who every said ANYTHING about a "strong boost"?!
Oh yeah, nobody did. The original question, if you do not remember was "Will this improve my page rank or be seen as a negative by the google monster? "
If the GoogleBar pagerank feature gave a detailed decimal number instead of a rounded of integer (i.e. 5.34353 rather than 5), I do think multiple links from separate pages may help slightly. I certainly do not think PR will increase at a rapid rate for multiple links, as you illustrate with your DMOZ website design example, but certainly has a slight effect on the long decimal page rank umber that hides behind the googlebar indicator, IMO.
Of course none of us know for sure, so all of these posts are simply "educated guesses" into what we think. A new site of mine with about 150 links from various pages on one domain received a page rank of 6 (all sub pages were PR4) in a manner of 1 and a half months. No other backlinks showed up with a page rank of 7 or 8 to give me the 6, it was all links from one domain. If I had only ONE of those, I would put money down that my PR would maybe get a 3, but most likely a 2.
I am starting to think the Google algo, and its various monthly forms is much less complex as many make it out to be. Sure it is not a simple little formula of 2 variables, but I am doubting that it is really as complex as some speak of it. We will see.

[edited by: ChrisKud5 at 8:20 pm (utc) on Jan. 7, 2004]

ChrisKud5

8:18 pm on Jan 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



"If you're splitting hairs over a "microscopic" boost that may or may not be there... Who cares? "

The original question had no reference to what size the PR boost may or may not be. No one was ever "splitting hairs", but they asked a question hopeing to receive an answer based on other peoples experiences.

doc_z

8:48 pm on Jan 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member Top Contributors Of The Month



If you want to verify that multiple links are devaluated you have to make some quantitative PR investigations. A qualitative look isn't enough.

Also, ignoring multiple links for PR purpose would lead to strange effects. For example, consider a large site with a shop. The PR of the shop (which only has internal incoming links) would be smaller if the shop is located at myshop.some-domain.com instead of www.mydomain.com/shop (for technical reasons).

Finally, there are also principle problems when multiple links would be ignored for PR calculation. How to chose the link which isn't ignored? Taking the highest PR link isn't possible because when starting the PR calculation you don't have this information and the choice can influence the result.
(This doesn't play a role in case of devaluating anchor text of multiple links. Also, it seems to be more useful paying more attention to anchor text when trying to improve the SERPs since it plays a more important role.)

The large and noticeable PR boost is no longer there.

I haven't seen a principle change in PR calculation for a long time. A devaluation of PR for the ranking algorithm or the devaluation of other off-page factors is a different story.

rfgdxm1

8:50 pm on Jan 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



OK, only Google knows for sure, but I'll chime in with my opinion. Based on real world observations involving certain sites, I am convinced that multiple links from the same site can boost a site's PR (or, more accurately the PR of pages throughout the site.) Some of these sites I refer to had very few backlinks. Thus, seeing the PR boost from getting more links from one specific site made it clear they were being counted. HOWEVER, I strongly suspect that Google somehow puts a cap on this sort of thing. Think here of PR being votes. Google does allow a site more than one vote it can cast for another site. However, to stop "stuffing the ballot box", there is a limit to how many votes a site can cast. This would make some sense. That a site might link to another site on 3 or 4 pages is something that one would expect to see happening with webmasters who didn't even know about Google PR. However, when Googlebot sees all 5,000 pages on site A linking to site B, Googlebot sees this as being likely artificial, and at some point quits counting (or, greatly diminishes the PR allowed to transfer.)

rfgdxm1

9:35 pm on Jan 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



>do you think google penalizes, filters or discounts these if they are crosslinked?

IMO, no if the crosslinking is minimal. Yes if it isn't. It is all kinds of common for amateur sites on a specific topic (say, fan sites for a certain band) to link to most of the other relevant sites about that band. In fact, if all these sites happen to be in the ODP category for that band, Google could via another algo factor count these links more heavily, because Googlebot can know these are on topic links, as opposed to links done just for Google PR reasons.

steveb

10:10 pm on Jan 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



I've never seen any evidence that Google doesn't like sites that have cross/reciprocal links like being described here. We aren't talking about every page on multiple domains. It's not good to generalize too much in the abstract, but what sleepy is talking about sounds like an excellent opportunity. (Maybe I'm not understanding your question though, Kirby. The linking talking about here is so minimal that I wouldn't even have thought about possible too much cross linking issues.)

PatrickDeese

10:24 pm on Jan 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



> I've never seen any evidence that Google doesn't like sites that have cross/reciprocal links like being described here

That's right Steve, you've never seen any evidence.

I have. I observed just recently (within the past 2 months) that a site's deep links to another site got ignored by Google completely, and they had been showing for the past 14 months or so without a problem.

And before you jump to conclusions, the site with the links that are being ignored, or filtered or whatever you want to call it went from PR 5 to PR 6, and the page with the links remained PR 5, where it has been for about 2 years.

rfgdxm1

10:43 pm on Jan 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



>I have. I observed just recently (within the past 2 months) that a site's deep links to another site got ignored by Google completely, and they had been showing for the past 14 months or so without a problem.

The Google link: command has been notorious for being inaccurate. Not long ago, using the link: command for the URLs of ODP categories I am listed editor of, my editor profile page was not showing. (For those unaware, the ODP software automatically includes on the profile page links to all the cats that editor is listed editor of; and each cat links back to the profile page.) This can only be reasonably explained by the link: command being buggy (after all, getting this right ain't exactly a priority at Google, as normal surfers don't use it), or Google intentionally fails to show a few. Possibly on the theory of making reverse engineering of PR more difficult.

lorenzinho2

10:52 pm on Jan 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



I observed just recently (within the past 2 months) that a site's deep links to another site got ignored by Google completely, and they had been showing for the past 14 months or so without a problem.

I'm seeing the same thing. By ignored, I assume you mean not showing up as backlinks according to Google?

While the visible backlinks seem to have been wiped out in these cases, the effect of those backlinks (PR, SERPS placement) still seems to be positive.

My theory for this is that Google is tiring of providing Webmasters with clues for how to manipulate their search engine (yet is hesitant to scrap their algo).

steve128

11:12 pm on Jan 7, 2004 (gmt 0)



A few months ago I got a PR8 link from the linking sites home page only (all internal pages seem to be PR7 or 6)
I have not checked them all, possibly 2/3 thousand pages)

Anyhow the link sure gave me a huge boost. So, 2-months ago the site owner altered the linking structure on his site and lucky me now has a link on every single page from his site..no difference in PR or rankings for me however.

My site remains PR7 (index) internal PR6.
Trouble is all links point to my home page, I would be interested to know if links pointed to sub-pages would be beneficial, I guess it would

I'm happpy and I aint gonna trouble the guy..now a contender according to ML..lose the link I'm dead meat -:

rfgdxm1

11:18 pm on Jan 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



>While the visible backlinks seem to have been wiped out in these cases, the effect of those backlinks (PR, SERPS placement) still seems to be positive.

This was the same thing that I saw with ODP cat PRs with the case of editor profile pages not showing in backlinks. (BTW, I didn't mention this in the last post, but after checking a number of ODP editor profile pages I found those were not showing in the backlinks of the cats they edited either.) Because of the way PR works, and the ODP is laid out, a lot of the ODP PR ends up flowing between the cats of each editor, assuming they edit more than one cat. This tends to narrow the difference between the highest and lowest PR cats in the ODP. Which Google likely sees as a Good Thing. Just because a backlink doesn't show doesn't mean that it was ignored for computing PR.

>My theory for this is that Google is tiring of providing Webmasters with clues for how to manipulate their search engine (yet is hesitant to scrap their algo).

Or, scrap the PR display in the toolbar. My best guess why Google doesn't usually show backlinks below PR4 is precisely to prevent reverse engineering PR. From the non-webmaster-SEO user point of view, showing incomplete backlinks makes this feature less useful. Google may randomly not show some PR4+ backlinks to further prevent SEOs from reverse engineering the algo.

PatrickDeese

11:51 pm on Jan 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

WebmasterWorld Senior Member 10+ Year Member



>The Google link: command has been notorious for being inaccurate.

The inaccuracies seem to be related to difference between the data centers - at any rate the discrepancies are far more noticeable for 5K+ backlinks than ˜200 backlinks (which the site I am referring to has).

> Not long ago, using the link: command for the URLs of ODP categories I am listed editor of, my editor profile page was not showing.

Sorry, I don't buy that. 6 months ago, DMOZ could hardly serve pages (I'm not slagging them, it was due to well documented technical problems), it is no surprise that links from the site weren't showing.

Also, I can only presume that the pages you are referring to had gTB PR 5 or better, because as we all know there is a cut off threshold between gTB PR 3 & PR 4 that links may or may not be shown in G backlink searches.

The pages on the site I am referring to were and are stil PR 5. Links to other domains from this page continue to show as backlinks, however the links to one particular site from this site have disappeared.

This leads me to the logical conclusion that G has somehow determined that the links to this site in particular are to be ignored.

flicker

11:58 pm on Jan 7, 2004 (gmt 0)

10+ Year Member



A very high-ranking .edu site recently linked to three of the articles on my website, and those three sites all jumped a PR level (while none of the others did). So I feel safe asserting that multiple links from one domain can indeed improve the PR of multiple pages of a site.

I think the bigger question is whether that matters. PR seems like a rather... quixotic... sort of measure to me. Those three articles don't seem to be getting any more Google traffic than the others out of their higher rank (though they're getting plenty from the .edu site).

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