Which weights more?: PR & Quality Vs. Quantity Of Links

[monsterisp]

I have a website with 616 incoming links from PR 5 sites and lower. On alltheweb I have close to 3,000 inbound links from PR 5 sites down to PR 0 sites. My current PR is only 5.... My question is have links from 3 sites which have a PR of 7. Would it be better for our own PR if I were to remove all 3,000 inbound links from the PR 5 sites and lower and only keep the 3 inbound links from the PR 7 sites? 3 links vs. 3,000 = greater "popularity"? Seems like we just cant beat the PR of 5 for our site even though the chemistry seems to be in place. Your advice is welcomed.

[jon80]

Are all the links going to the same page?

[Marketing Guy]

AFAIK PR is incremental - so it all helps.

Removing links so you only have 3 * PR7 links would not mean that you would get an "average" of PR7.

I had only one link to a site i launched and that was PR7 and the site got a PR4.

Scott

[monsterisp]

Yep

[jady]

Sounds like someone is going to change their domain name?

[MrSpeed]

Keep all the links. Try to optimize your internal linking structure to focus the PR where you want it. Also the larger your site the more PR you will get.

[monsterisp]

Already a large with with optimized internal linking... Just want to raise PR, and we have the inbound links, its just which are better, the whole or the individual?

[buckworks]

Watch out when you're checking links in AllTheWeb, because while it shows more links than Google you're not looking at a more in-depth report of the same thing, you're seeing something different. Why? Because unlike Google, ATW lumps links to internal pages and links to the home page all together in the same report.

If ATW shows 3000 links, it's a safe bet that they're not all going to the home page. This is perfectly okay, but it might mean that your assumptions about how PR is flowing within your own site aren't quite accurate.

Aside from internal link tweaking, the only way to raise PR is to have more outside links coming in to your system. You want every link you've got, and more more more!

Remember that an inbound link that is well worded can have other advantages besides PR.

[monsterisp]

yeah yeah old news, ;-) but my question is a general one. If a site has thousands of inbound links from poor quality PR sites and a few (3) high PR sites, would the poor sites PR cause me to rank lower than if I just had the 3 PR 7 sites linking to me and no others?

Its an interesting question because I've heard the proposition that lower PR sites linking to you can actually DECREASE your overall PR value, then if you had numerous of these sites linking to you it could actually weigh down your PR rather than build it... Orrr will these additional sites (or votes) actually act to increase your overall PR? I never really understood this part of the google algo and have heard differnt theories.

[John_Caius]

If this were the case then you could scupper your opposition by creating spammy pages that got the dreaded PR0 and then linking them all to your competitor.

I don't think there's much real evidence for anything other than incremental weighting.

Of course, once you're a PR 5, the effect of each PR 2 and 3 site linking to you on your overall PR is going to be virtually insignificant.

[buckworks]

<<would the poor sites PR cause me to rank lower than>>

NO.

[vik_c]

It's time one of you PR experts wrote an FAQ on Pagerank. I've seen this question about whether poor quality sites linking to our own can hurt, asked a zillion times here. It doesn't happen. It's only when you link to a PR0 can your ranking be affected adversely.

[freejung]

A great explanation of the PR algo is here:

[webmasterworld.com...]

I agree we should have a PR faq, I'm getting tired of posting the above link.

Incoming links can't hurt you. Outbound links may or may not hurt or help, nobody is quite sure, but it is suspected that the quality of your outbound links affects the SERPs but not PR. It is part of the other 99 parts of the algo, which we know less about than PR.

PR is pretty well understood. Go ahead and add the links from the high PR sites, do not try to remove the others, they won't hurt you.

A good link from a high PR site is worth way more than a large number of bad links from low PR sites. But all of them help you to some extent.