Should I Advertise for Pagerank?

[NYCJohnNova]

I was totally destroyed and I think I even incurred a PageRank penalty during this update. :(

I am curious to know if I should bother placing an ad with CitySearch since their page rank is high and maybe I can reap the benefits of a link from them.

The problem I find is that citysearch does have the direct url of its advertisers, but uses some sort of redirecting to the site, thus I am not sure if googlebot would recognize the linkage.

Thank You WebmasterWorld for all your help.

[Terry_Plank]

You mention PageRank, but what about your search results ranking for your keyword phrases that drive traffic? PageRank is only a contributing factor in your mosaic of traffic generation and sales.

I don't believe that advertising is the way to get the excellent links to you. Advertising is fine as a means of advertising to get traffic. But for consistent traffic having a good link strategy to get more qualified leads from other good sites is the first order of business. Then, that will help your PageRank and perhaps your search ranking.

But, how can you loose if more people send you good traffic. Search engine traffic is only one part of the mosaic of traffic generation. Oops, I already said that!

[Travoli]

The redirect ad link will probably not be spiderable and will not pass on PR. Also, if you have incurred a hand penalty, adding links will probably do nothing.