Inbound links affecting your PR

positive and negative effects of inbound links

[quayfee]

Hi All,

I read a thread here a few days ago talking about the PR gained from good inbounds (sites of PR9 giving you PR in the region PR8.7 was an example given).

Would the same happen in reverse for sites that are PR0. So if you have say 50 inbounds from PR0 sites would this have a major effect on a site that had equally as many or more good inbounds?

It would seem logical that this would be the case, but in our wonderful world of the internet, who knows!;)

Also, could it be that Google simply removes one good inbound from your list for every bad one? This would mean that one negative inbound did far greater harm to your PR than the benefit that would be gained from one good inbound link.

[dazz]

Inbound links from PR0 as far as i know cannot do you any harm as it has nothing to do with the site that is getting linked to. It would be open to corruption also as you could create 50 PR0 sites and link them all to a competitor!

[quayfee]

Now there's an idea! ;) We could start a whole new industry, anti-seo.

Back in reallity, thanks for that Dazz. I look after a site that was penalised last year when it had PR7, it's been back in with PR3 for a few months but won't get any higher.

I have heard that bad inbound links can harm your PR, assuming it's not simply from any site that is PR0 does anyone know any criteria that may be used to judge this? Presumable porn and illegal content, any other obvious ones?

CHeers

[fathom]

As you have no real control over inbound links to your site, there is no way millions of PR0 links can damage you.

Unless of course you link back! :)

[quayfee]

Ah!!! Now the penny is beginning to drop.:) Sorry, I'm still a bit of a newby at this.

So let me see if I have this straight...

Inbounds - let 'em link it can do you no harm.

Link back - only if the content is really relevant and thier PR is around the same as yours or better, coz Linking to non-relevant low PR sites will stuff your chances of building yours.

Fathom, thanks for giving that penny a little nudge.:)

[ciml]

> Linking to non-relevant low PR sites will stuff your chances of building yours.

Some people believe this, but I don't. In my opinion, a link out to a PR10 site has the same effect on your PageRank as a link out to a natural PR0 unless the link is penalised, in which case you might get hit (we've even seen this at dmoz.org).

Please keep in mind that the proportion of penalised domains is likely to be very small, it just looks common to us because the webmasters tend to come here to discuss it.

[quayfee]

So what we really need to be totally safe is a bit of historical information about any PR0 site that are linked to.

If they had a good PR but lost it there's a chance that you might suffer, if it's just a new site that hasn't gained one yet there should be no problem.

[rogerd]

There seem to be few "natural" PR0 sites. A few links to PR0 sites won't hurt you, though. I had a site go PR0, and the many sites that linked to it didn't appear to be affected. If a large number or large percentage of your links are to penalized sites, of course, that might set off some alarms.

Quayfee, if you had a PR7 site before and it is lingering around PR3 now, you are almost certainly still carrying a penalty - for weird crosslinking, for Zeus use, or some other infraction. If you search for some of the extensive PR0/low PR/penalty threads here, you'll find some discussion of that topic.

BTW, are the internal pages PR0? That's a related symptom.

[stevenha]

Is this a potential way that incoming links could hurt your page's ranking? (Finding out would be an interesting experiment).

Suppose a competitor had a PR0 page, and on that page they put many links to your page, and the anchor text of each link contained lots of non-keywords.

IF - the PR of 0 is multiplied by each link anchor text, resulting in 0, then it would have no effect,

But IF - the anchor text of incoming links is stored separately in a list someplace inside Google - to create an overall anchor-text-keyword-density value, then non-keyword containing links would dilute the keyword density within that list. If this is then multiplied by a composite PR value (representing the average PR of incoming links), that could be trouble. This type of calculation would be much more efficient, so it might be tempting... but hopefully it doesn't work that way.

[fathom]

A good rule of thumb.

If you main page is a PR1 then linking to a PR1 site (main page) isn't going to really hurt you. (getting higher PRs linking to you is always better though).

If PR2 and they are PR2 same thing

PR3 to PR3 same thing and so on PR to equal PR.

If the content on another site is a "MUST HAVE" for your visitors but their PR is less (one level isn't going to the kill you) but be caution.

A web site with a PR0 (any page) don't even consider it and if it's a must have - help the owner improve - if you can't do this yourself, send them here.

It is far to induce a higher performance link infrastructure than to go forward "at hock" simply because you "THINK" your visitors will approve. In reality few actually get their opinions in advance. The damage you can do to your current visitation, far outways any benefit you may give those remaining, after the fact.

[edited by: fathom at 4:13 pm (utc) on July 26, 2002]

[quayfee]

Rogerd - some internal pages are PR0 and some aren't, so perhaps that would explain why we have a limited PR. I'll have a look aroaund the suggested threads and see what I can find. We don't use Zeus at all, I know people that swear by it but it does seem to be asking for trouble.

Stevenha - I agree with you, I hope that the latter is not the case, we'd all be setting off attacks on each other, and then coming to Webmaster World telling each other about it... interesting scenario though;)