Page Links vs Site Links

[hedwig]

Hi

This may be a daft question (I have searched for posts on this topic but not found anything that answers my question......)

As part of my competitive research when optimising a site, I check the number of inbound links that the competing page has, and the number of inbound links the competing site has. For example, lets say that www.examplesite.com/examplepage.html is being returned as number three for the keyword "example test".

Lets say that www.example.com has 1000 inbound links, and www.example.com/examplespage.html has 10 inbound links.

What I would like to ask is how other people view the relative importance of these two numbers? I ask because a term I want to target returns pages from very large websites with massive numbers of inbound links, but the pages on which the keyword term itself appears have very few if any inbound links.

I just want to know if I am wasting my time because the resulting SITES all have huge numbers of inbound links, or if there is a realistic chance of succeeding because the specific pages have few inbound links.

Cheers

Tony

[tedster]

You're not necessarily wasting effort. Thousands of links to the site as a whole will tend to raise PR of all that site's pages, depending of course on the site's link structure. But direct links to a page will be a lot more important in the area of relevance.

Even with lower PR, your page can rank higher for a given search. What it takes is stronger relevance signals, and that includes your own on-topic backlinks, both internal and external. This is especially true if the topic of a well-ranked page is not very close to the "theme" of the site.