Google Devaluing "Links" and "Resources" Pages?

[robdwoods]

I've noticed of late that most of the "links" or "resources" pages I visit seem to have a toolbar PR of n/a. I don't recall an overt announcement by Google on this subject. Is this a recent change? Have they actually devalued these pages in terms of the link equity they can pass?

These are not new pages that have not achieved a toolbar PR as yet as some of them I've tracked are up to 8 or 10 years old. It's not that they are deep pages either as many are one click away from reasonable PR home pages.

Does anyone have insights into whether they have actually killed the link value passed from these types of pages or whether they are just playing with the toolbar PR.

I've gone to content exchanges recently rather than raw link exchanges so this doesn't really affect my SEO much but it would be interesting to know if they have totally devalued these types of links.

[rainborick]

It's difficult to know what Google does internally with such pages, but for several years now they have suppressed the Toolbar PageRank score of link exchange pages - especially link directories. At one time, it looked like any page named links.html was given the gray bar treatment, which led to the widespread use of the word "resources", but now they do more complex analysis of all pages for quality. Even link exchange pages with a modest Toolbar PageRank score do not seem to do much these days. It's seems safest to assume that the value of any such links, regardless of the Toolbar PageRank score, is very small.

[robdwoods]

Thanks rainborick. That's kind of what I assumed and why I try to repurpose link exchange requests into other opportunities like content exchanges, turning the exchange requester into an affiliate, etc. I had just noticed a trend lately that almost all of the pages I had visited recently showed and n/a, something I hadn't seen until recently.

[Planet13]

...I try to repurpose link exchange requests into other opportunities like content exchanges...

Can you clarify what you mean by "content exchanges"?

Are you suggesting put some of your content on their web site and they in turn put some of their content on your site?

Or are you saying something like writing an article that they would post on their site and then there would be links (with an affiliate code so they would get a commission) back to your site?

[dvduval]

We've seen lots of directories with pagerank on interior pages. Higher pagerank directories especially pass more pagerank to internal pages. Also, the quantity of links on a page (or collectively a site with many links per page), can bleed away pagerank much faster, resulting in internal pagerank decreases.

The same behavior has been apparent on forums as well where there are just tons of links per page (and I include internal links when I make my count).

[FranticFish]

I've seen this for years now. Rest of site will be PR3, PR4... links page is PR0 or greyed out.

A few years back I tried to see if there was a pattern to it, but I couldn't. Some sites that called their links page 'links.htm', had it in the menu as 'links', linking out to all and sundry and invited exchanges showed PR; others that called it 'resources' (back before this was common) linked to a few relevant sites and didn't encourage exchanges had reduced TBPR.

Couldn't find any common factors to do with size of site, age of domain. Didn't study link profiles in depth though, maybe the answer lies there.

Does this or has it ever represented a real reduction of PR? Or is it just smoke and mirrors from Google? Don't know, don't care. I'll take the link if the site is related to what I do. Even PR0 links pass anchor text.

[tigger]

Can you clarify what you mean by "content exchanges"?

I don't have links / resources / friends pages and only do content exchanges where links are placed within the body of the text

I've also been doing article exchanges as well but this is only for the link no affiliate links are placed within my article

[CainIV]

Difficult to say overall if this is devaluation. The issue is likely lack of content on the resources page.

I like Tigger's approach and endorse that. Much much better for the user - they can read the content and click on a contextually relevant link (to you) and vice versa.

If you provide solid authority links for the article published on the friend x's website, and link out, then you have some nice co-citation.

Build some links to that article from other relevant websites and you have - a recipe for warm apple pie.

[directwheels]

The most powerful (in terms of SEO) site in my niche is ranking almost solely on these exchanged links, which always makes me question how it's possible. They got all their links back in the link exchange days and they are sitting safely at position 1 for just about all the keywords in the niche. All the other competitors do much better in link acquisition, but no one has been able to surpass them.

Their domain is old, but other than that, they don't have any other advantages I can think of. They even lack content...

[jaffstar]

Sites that rely on link exchanges only, still dominate SERPS in various sectors. Therefore, dont pay too much attention to this.

PR Bar = Dont pay attention to it.
What Google says and means are two different things :)