Value Of Instant PR8?

hexed

May 4th 2004, 3:48 pm

Instant PR8 wouldn't mean anything if the keyword anchors weren't correct. However, using correct keyword anchors coupled with the PR8 ranking, it is my personal belief that a PR8 ranking would dominate 90% of the keywords on the internet.

Hexed

I don't think there is any question that $4000 a month for such a setup would be hasty if your business could rake in $40000 a month in revenue, such as credit card merchants, etc.

I don't pay for links however the advertising I do for edsolutions.ca is probably about 30% of my total revenue. This includes flyers, news paper ads to local newspapers, etc. So I don't see how online advertising should be any different if the market was there. Obivously Toronto computer service isn't globally marketed and for the most part we'd be throwing away our money.

However, if we were to open a 24/7 1-900 tech hotline, thats a different story..

Hexed

compar

May 4th 2004, 3:51 pm

It depends on the site and the product and the profit margin.

Even if a PR8 and the right anchor text put your at #1 in the SERPs, and I'm skeptical about that, you still have to convert the visitors when they hit your site. If all the elements don't work you could just be blasting your money away not matter what the price.

In the end it has to be decided on ROI.

Shawn, I'm mildly surprised at you asking the question. I didn't think you were a big fan of PR. Can you tell us your motivation for starting this thread?

digitalpoint

May 4th 2004, 3:53 pm

While not a "big" fan of PageRank, I still think it has value. Mostly was just curious though. It's not like I have a PR8 site anywhere, so... :)

As far as it having different values based on the type of site. I agree... so maybe I should have phrased it as What value would it have to you personally?

- Shawn

hexed

May 4th 2004, 3:53 pm

This is true, high PR doesn't mean as much as it did, and frankly I'm not a fan of PR either.

However, an instant PR8 with 1000s of properly formatted and thoughtout backlinks would dominate most any SERPs.

Hexed

kusadasi-guy

May 4th 2004, 3:57 pm

not only anchor text, themed site is more important i think.
For example; a link from a PR8 Computer site to a travel site is almost nothing. i have several PR7 links but the result is unsatisfactory... Topic Sensitive PR is more important IMHO...

digitalpoint

May 4th 2004, 4:10 pm

I would agree to some extent. But I think once you get over a certain level, the themed linking has less value. I'm pretty sure tons of PR8 and PR9 links would be beneficial to anyone (at least anyone looking for link development) regardless of the theme of those links.

- Shawn

kusadasi-guy

May 4th 2004, 4:24 pm

Sure, it's perfect. You can buy high PR links for a domain then links to your other domains.

(PR8 links to WebSite-A, then
Website-A links your site B-C-D ...etc)

BTW, what you mean by "getting over a certain level" ?

digitalpoint

May 4th 2004, 4:27 pm

By getting over a certain level, I meant that theming has a higher weight for lower PageRank links. So once you are over a certain level (for example PR6), they have value regardless of the theme.

- Shawn

kusadasi-guy

May 4th 2004, 4:37 pm

digitalpoint

May 4th 2004, 4:41 pm

I would take the 1 or 2 PR8 links.

- Shawn

GuyFromChicago

May 4th 2004, 4:57 pm

This subject is so interesting nowadays. I would like to ask a question.

For example, you have a site and have PR5.
Do you want 20-30 quality, natural and themed Back Links from PR4-5 websites or just 1 or 2 PR8 link(s) from irrelavant themed site(s)? Which one would be your prefer?

I'll take the 20 - 30 natural and themed back links.

I’ve been in the market for links for quite some time and have just started making a few small purchases. I feel like I’ve seen just about “pitch” for text link ads that exists…. high PR, low PR, expensive, not so expensive, related, not related….the list goes on.

Maybe it’s the traditional marketer in me, but I’ve been completely ignoring PR when looking at sites to buy links on. I’m primarily concerned with theme, with traffic being equally as important. Granted, theme & traffic being some what equal I'm taking the higher PR site if the price is right.

During the buying process I’ve continued to ask myself “what if Google changed it all tomorrow? Where would I be?” Google does have a habit of surprises. If the whole importance of linking changed tomorrow & I disappeared from the serps I want my links to be where my best potential customers may be in hopes that they will visit my site(s). While I doubt any of that will happen, if I’m paying for the link I may as well feel like I’m getting a little “protection” from the whims of Google.

That all applies to buying links. When it comes to free links or directory submissions just point me to the sign up form :)

hamaki

May 4th 2004, 5:22 pm

if one believes in dominating G SERPs in business is important, then i would treat buying a PR8 link just like any other marketing expense. to put a price on this tool depends on too many factors though... so let me just say that buying PR is a real option to be considered vs never put down money for a link.

john_loch

May 4th 2004, 11:04 pm

If that PR8 is coming from an auth site for your theme, well, the result I think is obvious. If it's a heavy theme (ie real estate) it'll do wonders IMHO.

If you're asking in terms of financial value, it's a matter of (as compar said) ROI. Onsell a link or 20 and you might cover the initial investment.

If it's off theme, it's just another 40%er.. (just another pr builder). The 40% bit is my figure as to the importance of overall PR.. it's seat of the pants and highly speculative but there you have it.. I just wish I could remember where I read it :)

Here's a question: If I had 10,000 PR3 pages within a site (ie my homepage has pr8 which propagates inward to become say 10,000 pages at PR3).. and I linked from them all to external site B-related. What cumulative effect would they have in terms of PR (ignoring the crawl time of course).

It's a legitimate question, I'd like to hear your thoughts :)

kusadasi-guy

May 5th 2004, 12:45 am

Here's a question: If I had 10,000 PR3 pages within a site (ie my homepage has pr8 which propagates inward to become say 10,000 pages at PR3).. and I linked from them all to external site B-related. What cumulative effect would they have in terms of PR (ignoring the crawl time of course).

Very good question. :rolleyes:
certainly, i prefer PR8 link. But if i havent any other site, have just 1 website, i prefer 20-30 natural-themed back links.

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&newwindow=1&c2coff=1&q=internet+marketing
(PR6 websites kicking PR7 websites)

1-2 months ago, one of mysite was PR6 and it was kicked by 2 PR4 websites.

And yes GuyFromChicago, themed backlinks brings traffic and prospective customers.

hans

May 5th 2004, 1:16 am

i have pr7 for free - just as a result fo some 20'000+ hrs of work during the past 7 yrs - and all under direct control and hence reproducable at any given time
i few weeks ago i had pr6 and all was like NOW

the 5-10% traffic increase per month is entirely the result of more new chapters and better services as well as improved or updated SEO

i see no difference between pr7 or pr8 o reven pr9 ..
i had plenty of #1 keypword positions before when i had pr6 and has similar number (98x #1 and 163x among top ten ) now.
i did NOT see any increase in serps as a result of pr6-7 move.
more chapters, more topics, more articles, more and better quality always end up in increase in traffic ... i am sure that is applicable for all site owners.

whatever you have achieved step by step as a result fo work rather than links is reproducable
whatever you win from links ove rnight can be lost over night and suddenly you are back to 0.

so if you are for whatever reason #1 or even among top 3-10 in any site relevant keyword combination .. then pls what exactly are additional benefits of higher PR ??

may be i fail to get an important message or miss to see a point

is the adsense click price higher for higher PR ??

expat

May 5th 2004, 2:19 am

Couple of PR5 carefully interlinked domains gives you daily sometimes twice daily crawl by G and interestingly if Y value is close you get Y and I crawl you daily as well.

Once one has an estanblished presence a PR4/5 for starters is easy to achive the above.

PR will have to change to include a relevancy element and I hope that G applies some brakes to links like only valuing one link per domain.

PR8 is a nice to have but it's lost it's importantce.

Linking structure will come under more scruteny as presently it's just too easy to manipulate G by just taking out the cheque book out and buy 1000's of links.

M

ephricon

May 5th 2004, 3:46 am

With regard to Hans' post - I can certainly see how the difference between PR 6 and PR 7 might not be a major one in many markets. I do, however, think the difference from 4 to 5 is quite significant and also from 5 to 6. Once you are at 6 than you'll have a leg up on at least be on par with most sites competing for a lesser-competitive term or regional searches. The 7,8,9s I think are really just necessary for highly competitive, national competition.

Anyhow, since no one actually said a number I'll say one... $1,000 to $1,500 or so.

I'm cheap and poor so that's why its so low, plus the fact that the PR, however high, is still one component in the mix. Even if my site would then become without a doubt the dominant player in my regional market in the SERPs I wouldn't be adding a dramatically greater amount of traffic as it already does pretty well. And then of course there's the whole idea that only X% will even turn into leads, and then from that X% into clients....

compar

May 5th 2004, 4:59 am

compar

May 5th 2004, 5:10 am

I'll take the 20 - 30 natural and themed back links.

Many of you have talked about the value of "themed links". I would like to see some of your evidence for this.

It was generally considered that the Florida update was Google's attempt to value the semantic or theme relationship of the link to the page it is on. But it is my opinion that that experiment failed and that now anchor text, and anchor text alone, is more important than ever.

I also think that PR as a driver of SERP position is of significantly less importance than pre Florida.

Now I'm sure that Google will eventually start to assess theme relationships as part of the measure of relevance, but I have not seen any evidence of it yet.

I'd welcome any evidence that anyone can present.

kusadasi-guy

May 5th 2004, 5:54 am

Bob, i am sure that all travel related KWs and their SERPs reflect us evidences.

http://www.google.com/search?sourceid=navclient&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=london+hotels

Many PR7 websites has been filtered so that why you can not see. But sites that have themed back links are not filtered out for example.

i have a travel related website and 1 month ago the PR was 6! But my website smacked with 2 different PR4 websites for my the most important keyword.

maybe there are some patterns for industries, for example: Travel related website require more themed links than computer related websites. And computer related websites requires authority website back links.... etc. just a thought...

candysmith

May 5th 2004, 6:06 am

Thanks Compar for giving us that link to the chart - I had not seen that before & find it very interesting.

I second everything you've said re themed links less important now & that Anchor Text is the most important at present. I hope this holds because I am seeing fabulous results due to my belief in that theory & implementation thereof which has held firm for the past few months.

PS: Thanks for your numerous postings... I always seem to learn something from you. You are very generous to share your knowledge with us.

dave487

May 5th 2004, 6:41 am

Out of interest, what are the approximate numbers of links you need to be PR5, PR6, PR7 etc assuming the sites linking to you are of average PR themselves?

john_loch

May 5th 2004, 8:18 am

I have posted this on a couple other threads, but I think you can find the answer in this chart (http://www.compar.com/PR.htm).

Great chart, I downloaded the csv the other day - thx again.

But perhaps I've missed something.. If one site points 10,000 pr3 pages at another single site (should read page), surely they don't all have a 'cumulative' effect on the other site/page per your chart.

(Otherwise one could theoretically just set up 2 sites, and hand themselves a pr 8+)..

How many inbound links from domain xyz can contribute to the pr of a target page on a different domain ?.. is there a cumulative effect, or does google simply say OK, there's one link from domain xyz, therefore all others from domain xyz targetting this page don't count ?

I know I'm missing something here, it's just that..

Couple of PR5 carefully interlinked domains gives you daily sometimes twice daily crawl by G and interestingly if Y value is close you get Y and I crawl you daily as well.

Once one has an estanblished presence a PR4/5 for starters is easy to achive the above.

It's the part about a couple of carefuly interlinked domains that has me wondering.. obviously expat's referring to interlinking across numerous pages between the two, rather than many to one, but still..

your thoughts ?

compar

May 5th 2004, 2:56 pm

All kinds of people who are buying and selling links are using what has become known as "run of site" schemes. In other words you buy a link from every page in my site. I think all of these links work. Look at the McDar experiment. I put up 55 links from the same website and they appear to have been very instrumental in driving that page to a decent place in the SERPs. http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=256

Of further interest is the fact that none of my 55 backlinks to McDar's page have an themeatic connection. The all use the same anchor text, but the page content is not related in any other way.

Now what would be interesting is to move those 55 links to pages of similar PR value but with tightly themed content. I personally don't think it would make much difference, but I'd love to be able to do the experiment.

In your example of 10,000 links from a single site, I guess this is possible but seems highly unlikely to me. Who is going to build a 10,000 page site just to crosslink to another site? But I would surmise that if you had 1,000 links from 10 different site it would work just fine.

compar

May 5th 2004, 2:57 pm

Out of interest, what are the approximate numbers of links you need to be PR5, PR6, PR7 etc assuming the sites linking to you are of average PR themselves?
Dave see my damn chart (http://www.compar.com/PR.htm).

GuyFromChicago

May 5th 2004, 9:21 pm

Many of you have talked about the value of "themed links". I would like to see some of your evidence for this.

The only value I think themed links have, at least for the time being, is more traffic (from the links, not serps) and higher coneversion at my site. I don't think that themed links do anything more than unthemed links in terms of your placement in the serps.

I think in the not-to-distant future themed links will play a larger role in the "weight" assigned to a link. I figure if I'm paying for a link, I may as well pay for one that's themed.

compar

May 11th 2004, 6:20 am

The only value I think themed links have, at least for the time being, is more traffic (from the links, not serps) and higher coneversion at my site. I don't think that themed links do anything more than unthemed links in terms of your placement in the serps.

I think in the not-to-distant future themed links will play a larger role in the "weight" assigned to a link. I figure if I'm paying for a link, I may as well pay for one that's themed.
I would agree with all of that. Most people today are only discussing links as they apply to the SERPs, but you are correct people can and do actually click through on well placed links.

If you want a couple of free links from a very relevant site here's a deal for you. Write a 500 to 1000 word article about your particular market segement emphasising the Internet relationship, and I will publish it in my InfoPool and give you the return links as part of the author credits.

Have a look at this article http://www.compar.com/infopool/articles/news27.html to see what another webmaster has done. This is the general size and format that I would like.

john_loch

May 11th 2004, 10:27 pm

GuyFromChicago

May 12th 2004, 12:23 pm

Linking structure will come under more scruteny as presently it's just too easy to manipulate G by just taking out the cheque book out and buy 1000's of links.

M

Don't take this the wrong way, but what's wrong with that?

Let's say my site sells blue widgets. I buy 10,000 links for a couple thousand bucks and move up in the serps to the top spot when the phrase blue widgets is searched. Isn't this helping the person searching find exactly what they are looking for?

People who spend $ to buy links don't buy links that are irrelevant to what they are trying to sell/promote. If I sold green widgets, I surely wouldn't spend a couple thousand bucks on links that said blue widgets - that would be plain stupid. If I knew that I wasn't competitive in terms of price or service I doubt I would spend thousands to get high rankings in the serps either. I'm of the opinion that people that invest in link buying feel they have a good product or service to offer, and I want to see the people who feel this way about their business in the serps.

The people who spend the most time, effort & money promoting their site deserve top billing in the serps in my opinion. I don't think it should be random, or "I got lucky" or anything else.

Think about for a moment if it wasn't relatively easy to manipulate Google. What if Google's results were full of manually added sites that Google had decided were relevant? What if Google hired a team to "hard code" sites into permanent positions for competitive terms?

The beauty of Google, and the strength of it's serp relevance are the people who are "manipulating" it every day. Buying links is just another resource that's available for the people who feel they have a great product or service to offer and want the world to know about.

If Google tries to penalize people that buy or sell links they're making a mistake - that's my opinion.

greg

May 15th 2004, 10:57 am

If i had the money and believed I could honestly sell some products then it would be worth it I think.

For instance BlueFind. I have no clue what John paid for the internet.com listings, or if he paid anything. I know however that we got pretty much an instant PR 8 out of it, and since then the sales and traffic have gone way up. So if you have a product that can really sell, like I think BlueFind can, then yeah it is worth it.

Personally I am broke though so paying for a PR anything is out of the question right now. I am just hoping that the fact that I run a quality organization will bring in links.

compar

May 15th 2004, 1:45 pm

Compar,

Have you considered a comment or blog style addition to the articles ?

I was contemplating doing an article for you as this is the third time I've read you inviting articles. Only problem is, the example you provide above is exactly the topic I was about to suggest :)

By providing a comments feature (or similar) you might benefit from freshness. Coincidentally, do you feed ?
Maybe Shawn will want to move this to a new thread. But you raise some interesting points because I'm looking for ways to dramatically increase the size of my article collection.

Here is what I 'd like to do. I'd like to build a collection -- call it a directory if you like -- of articles and information. It could include whitepapers and other information source I probably haven't thought of. I'd like these papers and articles tightly categorized. The objective is to very quickly expand this to 100,000 pages.

The business plan is to offer sponsors, run of the category, backlinks. My thought is to limit the sponsors links to a max of ten links per page.

Since these would be static pages they would collect significant PR very easily. Judging from the experience of my InfoPool every page in the collection would be PR5 or better.

Now to do this without a ton of editors, and to do it quickly, it has to be highly automated. I'm not up to speed on XML and RSS etc. but I'm sure that these technologies could be used. So in answer to your "do you feed" question the answer today is no. But I'd love to set that up.

So if anyone has the skills to help me in this I think that there is a ton of money to be made and I'm open to sharing the proceeds.

compar

May 15th 2004, 1:57 pm

If you read the results of the Poll for this thread 73% of the respondents say they would never buy a PR8. I personally think that's a lot of righteous hogwash.

I don't know if I'd pay $1,000 per month, but I'd like to bet that the vast majority of the people on this forum would buy the PR8 if the price was right. If they wouldn't buy it they would certainly trade services for it and that is just another way of buying it.

Buying links is simply Internet advertising. If you took a Poll and asked if people could buy the back cover of Time Magazine for a given price I bet you wouldn't get a 73% righteous "no I'd never buy an ad" response. In my mind it's bullshit when you get that response to the link question.

jfontestad

May 16th 2004, 9:33 am

This is my first post here and I have to say this thread is very informative. I was thinking about buying a text link from a high ranked PR site and I have learnt a lot from reading this thread.
The chart from Compar was also very interesting and informative, some nice work, but one question where did you get those statistics from?

compar

May 16th 2004, 12:37 pm

The chart from Compar was also very interesting and informative, some nice work, but one question where did you get those statistics from?

The chart was developed as part of another thread on this forum. I don't even remember which. It represents the best guess of a bunch of observers, and all I did was create the formula's that reflected what would be the impact of those best guesses.

I've shown it to a lot of people who did not immediately participate in it's creation and no knowledgable person to date has refuted the results.