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I have a website that seems to be doing pretty good in search engine. Anyway I have been selling Link to other sites and im starting to wonder if by doing this my site will become less apealing to search engines? My site is programming related and i have links that dont have anything to do with this - obviously to increase their website rankings.
Also I heard someone say my site has a high PR? anyone know what this means?
Thanks for any help, and have a nice day.
[edited by: agerhart at 1:29 pm (utc) on Aug. 27, 2003]
[edit reason] removed specifics [/edit]
About PageRank (PR) and Google in general: [webmasterworld.com...]
About linking to other sites: try a site search for 'bad neighborhoods'. Linking to 'bad' sites is felt to have negative influence on your PR, and hence on your ranking at Google.
You've found the right place and you've got the reasons for buying links right already ;)
PR is Google slang for "you have a pretty attractive page". It's not "site" as this figure is computed for individual pages.
It means PageRank, and it's very hard to get a high one, unless you buy/get links from a higher one of course. Just to compare Yahoo is 9 and Google 10, i think. You can control this by installing the Google Toolbar with advanced features and going to your site, a little green bar will show the PR. The Toolbar PR is not the same as used internally by Google, but it's all we have "on the outside".
Your PR comes because.. well, long story, the essence being that other pages have linked to your page. As your PR is high you have got pages linking to you that are important (in terms of inbound links) - and so is your own page.
You will not ruin you own pages PR by linking to others. Their pages will gain, as your link will be interpreted as a "vote" for them, but you will not lose. Search engines like pages that link to others. Do keep the amount of links on a minimum for each page though. For two reasons:
1) The amount of "voting" that your page gives will be distributed among all the links of a page - fewer links means higher votes for each link... and higher pay to you.
2) Google's own spidering limit is 150 links per page they say somewhere. If you're included on a page with a lot of other links chances are smaller that the spider will visit you.
Apart from all that... well, you gave it away, didn't you?
User relevance, not SE-relevance. Think about it. That was what gave you your PR figure in the first place, as people chose to link to your good site.
If these outgoing links are to gardening sites and your site is about computing, well, what's the use for them there, really? What will be the benefit for your users of such links? I see almost none, the only one being a little penny in the pocket for you, which means ressources to develop the site, but that's all - otherwise i'd say they were highly irrelevant.
/claus
I think will need to get that google toolbar installed. I curently have Alexa and my rank changes from day to day on that (something like 80,000 now).
Regards to you all and thanks again :)
That's sort of a traffic measure/rating, but you don't really need it because that's what you already get from your tracking system (or in some odd form from your logfiles if not using tracking).
The Google PR is something else, because it's independent of traffic. You can have PR0 even with thousands of visitors and you can have PR10 with none. Theoretically and all things equal and all that.
Google PR is a measure of the "importance" of the individual pages of your site measured by how many that links to them, and how important those linking pages are themselves. You will not see that heavy fluctuation in PR, as linking patterns are reasonably stable and independent of traffic. Also, it's a logaritmic scale, so the higher your PR, the harder it is to rise one level.
/claus
Thanks for the advice. I have a coiple more concerns now.
When you say google has a max of 150 links per page, is this internal, external or both?
Also if for some reason my page drops to seven or lower, will it be harder to get back up again? or can I just change my page back to the way its was?
What do you think is the maximim of external links to have without degrading the quality for my page and others?
One more - does having links on every page on the site degrade the quality or is this no appropriate as google works on page basis.
Sorry for all the questions, but you seem to know your stuff when it come to things like this.
thank again for all your previous help :)
>> max of 150 links per page, is this internal, external or both?
That's just what they say on one of their FAQ pages somewhere. It's "links" so i guess it's both
>> if my page drops, will it be harder to get back up again?
Definitely yes.
>> or can I just change my page back to the way its was?
That does not help. It's not your page, it's the pages linking to you.
>> What do you think is the maximim of external links to have
>> without degrading the quality for my page and others?
That's a tough one. If you want to do the work, you could start a directory - that would perhaps even increase your perceived quality.
I don't think there's a max per site, it all depends on the presentation - rather i think that there's a max per page. I know Google says it can handle 150 but most humans can't handle that many - keep it at max 10-20 or so externals per page, i'd say - you will do more good for your link partners (the ones you link to) the less links that are found on the same page as their link.
>> One more - does having links on every page on the site degrade the quality
That you are linking out does not mean that your page will get degraded. In general. In some cases it will, search this forum for "link farm" and "free for all" (or "FFA") for examples.
>> or is this no appropriate as google works on page basis.
Google vill let your page vote for the sites you are linking to. The more links on each page, the less the vote will be for each. A (very) rough example; two links means 0,5 vote for each, while 10 links means 0,1 vote for each.
Your page does not become less worth because it "votes" for others - the worth of you page is determined by who links to that page. Again, in general, search for "bad neghborhood" on this site - it's also mentioned on the Google FAQ/webmaster pages.
>> Sorry for all the questions
No problem :) Browse a bit around in the forums in here, there's lots of that kind of information. It's not all scientificfacts though - these things tend to change a bit all the time, and there are things that only the Search Engines themselves know as well.
Here's some info from Google. A lot of people don't know it's there but it does give quite a few hints:
[google.com...]
/claus
claus >>Definitely yes.
Something very strange has happened - This morning my rating had dropped one point (and I noticed an other site with the same rating also dropped), anyway I was trying my best to remove anything that could have caused this and went to check my site again... and guess what? it went back to the same rank as it was (up one point)! The other site I mentioned also climbed up a point.
These PR things just get stranger by the day, there seems to be some factor that is calculated in real time and not based on googles previous crawl. Its seems the fluctuation may be more variable that Alexa after all.
stuart
Added:
The explanation might be here (update of PR): [webmasterworld.com...]
/claus
