Links page no good?

Does this hurt PR?

[Eljaybe]

I'm hearing more talk about spreading outbound links throughout your site rather than having a "Links page" on your site.
My site has an on-topic Links page for each sub-site. I have PR0 for one Links page, and PR4 for another. I'm not sure why this happened, but maybe I should forget about a Links page and start spreading out my links on each page of content within my site?

This doesn't make sense to me, since I see so many pages with NO content and just a bunch of links ranking high on Google & Yahoo. How are they ranking so high? Isn't relevant content better to have than a bunch of links on a page?

[Eljaybe]

Any thoughts on this at all?

[muesli]

i don't have any answers (curious for them, too), just one hint:

my links page (PR5) doesn't show up as backlink for anyone (called "links" in URL, <h1> and anchortext, but with pretty much non-linked text on it).

[BigDave]

If your links page is there to be useful for your users, then don't worry about whether or not it is being counted by Google. If it is there as part of a links exchange plan, then you should worry about it. At least rename it if it matters to you.

My links pages, all named links.php, and with the word "links" in the title, are still doing fine and always showing up as backlinks. I have no idea why I have gotten past whatever filter is in effect, and I really don't care. They aren't there for Google, they are there as a resource for the user. If Google likes them, it is fine with me, and if they don't, that is fine too.

[muesli]

dave, i totally agree. sure i'm not gonna rename the page just because of google.

[designhaus]

if u are looking to specifically boost your rank in google with a links page well ... its not the best idea i dont need to reiterate what Bigdave said!links pages in alot of cases are not looked at by google and dont count as backlinks in most cases. personally i have had links.htm pages in the past and they have been penelised but i must admit that they contained rubbish ... i removed the rubbish links and renamed the file to something other than links.htm and it fine now. this was quite a few months ago. i wouldnt change anything in my sites now to suit google! Just my opinion though

[Eljaybe]

Great thoughts everyone, thanks. I had cleaned up my links page (PR0) months ago and renamed it, but no movement in PR yet. I'm not too concerned about it getting indexed on Google, but I would like to get a higher PR. I just wondered if there is a better way to post links on your site.

[BigDave]

Put a link on a page where it makes sense. If you have that links page as a bunch of resources for your user, when you finish putting together a page, think about what resources would apply to the subject of that page and include them there.

[seomike2003]

hint: don't call it links.html,links.php,links.asp etc etc. you might as well name it fabricated_wannabe_hub_so_ignore_me.html :)

[Eljaybe]

I renamed my links page /resources.htm
Is that ok?

[AthlonInside]

Make your links page yourself instead of using some links software or services so it won't be easily detected as a links page.

And keep all links (including internal) in a page to less than 100.

[BroadProspect]

>>
I renamed my links page /resources.htm
Is that ok?
>>>

but now the page pr will be 0 since google does not know that page yet
/BP

[tigger]

so it will get resolved after the next update, I use resources and all my links can be be seen on other sites backward links

[BigDave]

There *is* more to it than just the name. Mine is named links.php, the title is "example.com - links". There are 309 links on the page, and the page is PR5 and it shows up as a backlink even for the last one on the list.

Now I don't know what they filter on other than the name, but the name is only part of it. So changing the name is only a quick fix, it is not a long-term fix if google decides to start looking at other file names.

[Eljaybe]

I have 78 links on my PR0 links page. They all have short descriptions, too. Am I getting dangerously close to that 100 mark? I feel they are all relevant links, but maybe I should cut them down to 50 or less?

[BigDave]

The link count has absolutely nothing to do with your PR0. It's a red herring.

[IITian]

I have a links page named links.html on my personal site - it started showing PR0 recently and it is not even competing with Google for any business.

First I thought, maybe my link to Bill Gates' speech hosted on microsoft.com is the culprit, but finally I decided to rename the file to resources.html and made suitable changes to a couple of places linking to it.
After doing the changes when I checked the PR of my non-existent links.html page it was showing 4.

I quickly changed back all resources.html to links.html.

Moral of the story: Am still thinking.