Forum Moderators: open
Create a profile on Yahoo and your profile page will be [profiles.yahoo.com...]
create a link to your site and join all the clubs relevant so that the page is kind of on topic. Then go to Google and submit that actual page.
One concern i initally have is that it obviously will be an orphan page - will this knock my theory on the head ;)
Check out a bunch of Yahoo profiles, eventually you will find some with lower PR. These will invariably be linked to other full websites (commonly geocities pages). They will then pass pagerank normally and that PR7 you thought you had will be PR4 or whatever.
They only show a PR7 due to a "toolbar guess" which is what happens when Google doesn't have enough information to assign a real PageRank.
The guess is based on how far away the page is from the root domain.
For example...
If www.randomsite.com has a real PR of 6 and the toolbar needs to make a guess it will display...
PR5 for www.randomsite.com/folder1
PR4 for www.randomsite.com/folder1/folder2
PR3 for www.randomsite.com/folder1/folder2/folder3
etc.
does that make sense? probably not.
Anyway, what I am saying is do NOT rely on it, and instead work on getting quality related inbound links.
Its not that difficult.
Shak
Also found that having an outgoing link page that isn't linked to from anywhere in my site doesn't penalize me. I've been setting up lots of free exchanges with linktrade.biz and while they are all very low PR and don't show in a reverse link search they are having substantial impact on my PR, I've gotten my small site up from zero to a three on my "target" page.
Another place to get reciprical links is on a site like xanga, mention your link in the main blogging section and in the guestbook and then link from your site to the xanga pages to take advantage of their high PR. I have not found the Xanga PR to drop once it is indexed by google, so I don't think the yahoo link would drop either. I'm going to give the yahoo a try, thanks for the suggestion.
Now if you put a photo of Britney Spears in your profile, and get a bunch of other people to link to it, then you could extract a positive out of the profile page. Otherwise its just smoke and mirrors.
Also, back to your original question, yahoo clubs are also usually that phantom PR. If there aren't backward links to a club shown, the PR in the toolbar means nothing, so getting links from clubs is usually no help. On the other hand, if the clubs are on topic, no harm having your link there.
Sorry to bring this back but I have seen such a Yahoo profile count as a backlink, e.g be listed in Google's link list when doing link:www.domain.com. Also, some profiles are linked from members.yahoo.com. Can anyone tell me how can it show as a backlink since it's an extrapolated PR?
He did have his profile set up as public and has us listed as a cool site.
We are now conducting an experiment with several of our profiles to see how we can affect things with it. It appears that the majoriey of the PR comes from the message pages from the discussion lists that contain a link to the profile page of the poster, but it will take several months to come to a definitive conclusion.
Is it worth it to have one page with low PR pointing to your site? Not really. But we have a couple thousand members, many of whom are active in several Yahoo groups. A few hundred PR3-4 links can be quite worthwhile. They can also give their own homepage a link and then link their page to ours if they wish.
So there are cases where it maks sense to go to the effort. But in the case of commercial sites, or if you don't participate in any of the groups that will give you all those PR1 links from the archives for free, then I wouldn't bother.
<added>Oh yeah, don't even bother to submit it to google. If they do not find enough links to it, it will not make the cut. And if they do, then you don't need to submit it in the first place</added>
Might be a better use of time to seek out, or hey, why not even, maybe, sorta consider creating some new original content.
As Charles once said via Snoopy - he who lives by the dirty little dropshot, dies by the dirty little dropshot.
You're right if it was a PR7, but like I said, you have to be active with the account in groups with public archives. Just setting up the accounts does not do you any good.
And in the case of sites where you really do have a lot of active members that are willing to list you as one of their cool links, then it is not spam! It is hundreds of individual people putting a link on a page that they control, to a site that they really do think is "cool", otherwise they would not be spending so much of their time at that site in the first place.
It would be a huge waste of time for a single person to try and influence their ranking this way. But if you have an already active account, then it is certainly not a waste to spend 30 seconds to add a link to your page.
I can link a PR6 page to my Yahoo profile. The Yahoo profile will then become PR5 (or maybe PR4). I then link it back to my PR6 Page (or any page), and it will show as a PR5 backlink.
This accomplishes basically nothing.