Backlinks – Can they change your life? PageRank, Traffic or Site Quality?

[inkymike]

Ok so in your opinion what are back-links really useful for nowadays?

I’ve read that they can improve your page rank, assuming you link to and are linked from relevant sites with similar or higher page rank. But then I also read that page rank isn’t what it used to be.

I’ve also read that back links can bring you traffic. This makes sense if you can get listed on a few sites relevant to your own. But how to do this, and at what cost. Is it worth the investment?

Finally I guess having relevant back links that help improve your PR and traffic can only in turn improve the quality of your site. Both in terms of having more targeted visitors and also by convincing search engines such as Google that your site is what it says it is.

What are your thoughts/experiences? Can back links change your life?

Mike
Eye On MOGS

[mad4]

All backlinks improve your pagerank not just relevant ones (as long as spiders can follow them).

However relevant ones do much more to help your rankings than non relevant ones.

Pagerank can easily be manipulated, if you can get thousands of links you will have a good pagerank. This is only a small part of the algorithm now though so you need to look at much more factors to get good rankings.

However you won't get good rankings if you don't have lots of good backlinks.

[Foxy]

All backlinks improve your pagerank not just relevant ones (as long as spiders can follow them).

Not strictly true - 10000 links from one site to yours will be degraded to one [or thereabouts]. There is reason to believe that links from the same c class will have a negative effect except this has yet to be substantiated and, in my case, I do so and the links do show positively ....so !

Page Rank has been downgraded substantially and no longer carries the weight it used to in the algo as mentioned above.

However relevant ones do much more to help your rankings than non relevant ones

This has not been proven, and, although I have reason to believe that this will be the effect in the future at this moment in time it is not so, although relevant words around the link do have an effect.

Pagerank can easily be manipulated, if you can get thousands of links you will have a good pagerank.

Easily be manipulated? hmmmm, I'm not sure what you mean by this !....thousands of links do not mean good PR...links from pages of high PR does.

However you won't get good rankings if you don't have lots of good backlinks

Ahhh....now your talking, but it is all how you use them. :)

[mdvaldosta]

Relevant backlinks have a greater impact on serps (trustrank), as well as direct traffic from that link. Relevance does not affect pagerank however. Pagerank has a small effect for how strong your pages rank overall, but mostly pagerank is simply an indicator of the links coming into your site - and not their quality or revelevance.

Relevent backlinks with targeted anchor text will pay off bigtime in the longrun, but I've seen evidence since Jagger that their devalued or not counted until they get some age (Google).

[marketjunction]

They help people find you--obviously.