Forum Moderators: martinibuster
I clicked through to the clients website, then to their reciprocal links page, and discovered that the client was exchanging links with almost four hundred other websites.
These links were all related, in one way or another, to the focus of the client's website. But the highest PR he could achieve is six but that's fairly easy to achieve with substantially less than the nearly 400 links the client has.
These weren't interlinked clients. Someone put many hours into this.
But it seems the optimizer was spinning his wheels for very little benefit to the client. Actually, I can't say this for certain. But the optimizer must have made some good money doing this.
One thing to consider is that PageRank is just one factor of the Google algorithm, and basing your website campaign on increasing your PR may be a little naive. Daniel Dulitz, a Google engineer had this to say [e-marketing-news.co.uk]:
...we don't lie in the PageRank bar. But it's not very precise.
We have a lot more precision available to us than we represent in a ten step scale or whatever it is on the PageRank tool...
What does this mean to you?
I'm curious as to how much criteria other than imbound links contibute to serp
The fact that they are aft4er tons of links says they understand that PR is a small part of G ranking, but links are a LARGE part of the scoring algo.
Obviously a PR6 with one link is not as good as a PR6 with 500 anchor links. Also, it is widely believed that overall link popularity weighs in the scoring algo.
In other words, I can make any new page/site I have become PR6 simply by linking to it from one of our PR7 pages. I would rather have a PR4 with tons of links pointing to it though...
martinibuster, I know you know way too much to post this, are you just pulling our leg?
Ok, my hands are leg-free, now. Just want to encourage a discussion about links on a boring weekend. ;)
You're right, mfishy, there is a benefit to having a large amount of backlinks, even if they give you a minimal amount of PR. I've seen that in action with a competitor. In fact, it worked so well they prospered during the Florida update and continue to do so now.
On the other hand, if all of your inbounds are from reciprocal link exchanges, I would feel a little bit nervous, just from knowing, in the back of my mind, that not all the bases are covered.
So, how would you say your linking strategy played into that?
Anchor text, although devalued in certain cases, is still very, very important for scoring well with G - particularly with 3 word+ phrases.
Why is it so bad? Is it because it is easy to identify or because if you look like you are exchanging links to promote in search engines you'll get penalized?
>>>made $3 from adsense yesterdayLOL!
So, how would you say your linking strategy played into that?
Anyways, on a more serious note...
...we don't lie in the PageRank bar. But it's not very precise.
We have a lot more precision available to us than we represent in a ten step scale or whatever it is on the PageRank tool...
