I understand that when deciding whether or not to exchange links with another website which has related content, I should check that the pagerank is equal or greater than that of my site. However does this mean that I should compare the pagerank of the main domains or of the actual pages where the links are placed?
Links are about much more than just their ability to add a point or two in your search ranking and should be measured as such.
This means considering the traffic they can bring, the relevancy to your site, the value to your visitors and then their search boost. If you stick to this pagerank is higher rule you’ll lose far more than you gain.
I agree that these are the most important factors, but if they all apply, I don’t want to downgrade the rating of my own site by linking to a site of a lower pagerank. I understand that pagerank is part of the way that Google calculates your site value - glad to be proved wrong though.
Pagerank is one of many elements that goes into ranking but by no means the only one. Here’s an older (and thus likely dated) article that does a great job talking about many of the factors at play. The reason I like this post is the emphasis it places on relevancy – having links to a bunch of irrelevant, spammy sites with higher PR is going to have more of a negative impact than linking to something that’s a great fit but not as well optimized (it also talks about your original question of domain vs page weight).
But seriously don’t ignore the big picture in the quest for the magic SEO solution. PR does not measure the ability for a site to send you traffic which is the whole point, right?
[font=verdana]PageRank really doesn’t matter. How many more times do I have to say that? It is just one of over 200 factors that Google considers when ranking a page, and it hasn’t been a significant one for at least 5 years. Google realised that it made a big mistake by going so public with PageRank, and it just opened the system up to gamers, rendering it a thoroughly useless metric because it was too easy to manipulate.
The benefits you will get, in terms of direct traffic and reputation/relevance in search engines’ eyes, of building useful links to and from suitable sites, far outweighs the minuscule downside of linking with low-PR pages. And to be honest, even then I’m not convinced that there is any potential damage. If it’s a case of having a link from a low-PR page or not having a link from a low-PR page, Google isn’t going to mark you down for having that link (if it did then it would be trivially easy to sink your competitors!), so you aren’t going to lose by it.
But if you want to ignore Ted’s advice and mine, you need to look at the actual page where the link is, not the homepage of the site. That’s where a lot of people go wrong – they find a directory site with a home page of say PR6, and think that’s a wonderful place to get links from. What they don’t realise is that their link is at best on a page with PR1 and often not even that, and it’s spread over hundreds if not thousands of outbound links on the page, so they’re getting pretty much nothing at all from the link.[/font]
Pagerank got some value, but relevancy is the major factor as per backlinks. Having links from related pages on related sites is much more important then PR consideration.
Also its not right that you would loose PR linking to lower PR sites; provided you do it right. Linking to related, authority sites is rather beneficial for your website.
Yea, you are right. But PR is not important for SEO ranking, content is important.
Everyone keeps going on about how important PR is or how unimportant it is.
I think it does have it’s importance. It’s factor in SEO. It’s an indicator to yourself how well your site is doing and it also becomes a factor when you wish to have people pay to place links on your site. Before that last bit is jumped on. I am not talking link farms, I am talking a few people wanting to display relevant links from your site to theirs…
[FONT=Verdana]That would seem to make no sense. The point of getting a link from a high PR page (apparently) is that it’s considered to pass more “Google-juice” than a link from a low PR page. However, if it’s a paid link, then it should be marked as nofollow - and therefore passes no "Google-juice at all.
I can honestly say, I have no idea of the PR for any of my pages, nor any of the pages on other sites that I link to/from - and I’m happy enough with the results. :)[/FONT]
The Page Rank is one of the oldest element of the Google’s algorithm! It can be checked by having a look in Larry Page’s Patent application of backrub search engine(now known as Google)!
Anyways back to the point, don’t ever go alone with the PR value, instead check for the authority value of the site! and the niche category and types of links it has listed in it(even it does matter after the Penguin Update) Thanks
Some other thread also has PageRank as their hot topic. I wonder what’s up with it. On the topic! PageRank isn’t really something that you can use to determine how authoritative a site is. It’s just some number generated with respect to the algorithm that’s used to find out the actual PR of a page. If you’re looking for those high-PR do-follow blogs, I suggest that you should stop focusing on building just those type of tips. If you’re looking for just the link juice, there are a lot more lower PR sites that might need your help.
Normally main domains have better page rank than the inner pages, but you must check the pagerank of the page where your link is going to be placed, as this gives more effect on link exchange.
The most valuable links are natural ones. Natural links are an indication of great content…it means that people are linking to you because they find your site interesting and they’re receiving any incentives for the links.