Traffic not PR counts

reciprocal links still work?

[reprint]

If I am understanding the theme of a number of threads correctly, to earn money by adsense or product, what counts is traffic and not PR. If traffic is what counts, shouldn't reciprocal links be a priority to generate more traffic regardless of what it does to PR? Whether they are two way or one way links shouldnt matter so long as they are generating traffic. I am getting the impression that PR does not directly relate to search engine position anymore and so hunting PR isnt enough. Am I getting the right message?

thanks

[Halfdeck]

"If traffic is what counts, shouldn't reciprocal links be a priority to generate more traffic regardless of what it does to PR?"

If the intent of the recips is to generate traffic, not improve search engine ranking, then Google's advice is to use nofollow on those links so that PageRank doesn't flow and indexing/ranking is unaffected. You get the traffic. SERPs stay "clean." Everybody's happy.

[sunny_kat]

PR is now nowhere related to the high search engine positions now...Earning through adsense only is propotionate to high traffic

[randle]

I have gone back and forth on the issue of PR a bit myself. I don’t put much stock in PR having any real significance to how your index page ranks. Thus for that page, I would agree “what counts is traffic and not PR”. However, I do believe interior PR is critical these days in warding off having pages deemed supplemental. It seems that low PR pages, (PR 1, 2 even 3) are highly susceptible to this. Maybe it’s like the wild, the strong survive and the weak and diseased don’t and just die off.

These low PR pages historically (for us anyway) played a major role in generating traffic through the Long Tail, obscure terms that are searched for less, but lots and lots of them.

So, to conclude; The PR everyone really focuses on, for the index page I would agree that its impact on ranking is not large (now crawl frequency that’s another story) but for interior pages good PR seems to be quite important to keeping them vibrant and out of the supplemental index, and being able to generate significant amounts of traffic.

Why is this? I believe with all that’s going on right now that’s a great question and one worthy of discussion.

[BigDave]

PR still matters to ranking, it just isn't the overwhelming factor that it used to be.

Don't put nofollow on your links just because they are reciprocal. There is a difference between natural reciprocal links and exchanged links. I have a link to my girlfriend's site and she has a link to mine. There is no reason to put a nofollow on the link, and google does not expect it.

Exchanged links are another matter. Google looks for linking trends. Groups of sites naturally interlink. Libraries naturally link to other nearby libraries. They also link to lots of other resources that don't necessarily link back. They have lots of inbound links that they do not have a matching outbound for.

See the difference between that library and a site that built most of its links through a link exchange program? Could you spot the difference as a human? Then Google can probably spot it with an algo.

[reprint]

Thanks for the info. Makes sense that linking should not stand out as artifical or else it would be flagged.