A Test - Can a authority link improve your search engine ranking?

Do links to other sites raise PageRank?

http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=222159

The above thread from the general marketing section asked if an external link could improve your PageRank. I and a few others, said NO, but an external link to a related authority site could improve your ranking. I think it creates a relationship between your site and the authority that is helpful in a couple of ways:

1. It helps the search engines better understand the theme of your page.
2. It improves the trust search engines place in your content.

I have a way to find out. I have linked two of my pages to a prominent website that those pages are closely related to. I have not added a link on my homepage, because I don't want potential visitors sent there. My homepage currently ranks 112 for their keyword on Google, but the two pages are the homepages (directory menu) for a total of 20 pages of high quality content on the subject. The two pages I have added the link to currently rank at 360 and 747+.

This is something I had intended to do, but had not gotten around to yet. Anyway, I think it will make a nice test case.

I am putting my website where my mouth is. Let's see what happens.

 

I believe so. And that is what I read on this forum on many orations.
-- That is the purpose lot of people buy links.

Thanks

 

OK .. I want to make sure I understood that correctly.

You've posted a link on your (non authoritive) website to high pr authority website for your desired keywords and you expect that YOUR ranking will be increased because you've linked to this Authority website????????

Please correct me if my impression was wrong ..

Cheers,

Venetsian.

 

That's right and certainly not worth to be mocked down!

 

My impression is that it is not a settled issue in many people's mind. There is the "Not external links, horde your PageRank" crowd.

I think my site will make a great test case. I have tons more quality content than most of the 359 pages that rank before me. The directory page is a PR4, the content pages are PR3. I rank top1, top 5 and top 10 for many phrases including this keyword, but I basically don't exist for the keyword itself.

We'll see what happens!

 

Sounds like an interesting test, but its hard to determine what will be the cause.

It also depends on the anchortext used on the link out to the authoritive site.

My experience is that if you link out to any related site, authoritive or non-authoritive, with anchortext that you want to rank for, your rankings will go up. Most likely because it is extra evidence that your site is about a certain topic and just because you mention the desired rankingword an extra time on your page.

IMO if you want to test if it is the authority of linking out site that is causing the higher ranking, you have to used a non-descriptive anchortext such as "a" to link out, just to rule out the above possibility.

Oh, and it is not PageRank that you are researching, it is where your page is ranked, ie SERP's.

 

SEOBook does seem to think this would work. Better though would be to get a link to your site next to a link to one of those sites (or several).

 

I have a ton of great quality content on the topic, I have decent page rank on the directory and landing pages and I rank very high for keyword combinations with this keyword. In terms of the keyword itself, I basically don't exist. I believe the external link to the authority site will more closely relate the two sites from the search engine's point of view. If that is true, my ranking for the keyword should increase. I think my site is a good test of the theory.

 

that will be interesting experiment
please update this thread constantly .. i'm really curious about the effect

Good luck bro,

Cheers,

Venetsian.

 

For the record, the keyword density is already 6%. I did not need to add an extra keyword. I took the first instance of the keyword at the beginning of my content and added the link. The link is not buried at the bottom of the page in microtype. It is at the beginning of the content in normal type.

My intention is to leave these pages alone for at least a two week test.

My test has nothing to do with PageRank, it is all about SERP.

 

Thanks for your encouragement. Since my rank changes daily, I will try to report back daily.

 

Cool..

Works for me ..

And by the way .. if this thing works .. wow .. i'm going brutal on G
ha ha ha ha ha ..

Cheers to all,

Venetsian.

 

Dont image that by placing links in your site to high PR sites, your site page rank will grow. Instead will lower.
Ex: if you link to yahoo.com your pagerank will not grow, but if yahoo.com would link to your site, then your page rank will grow.

 

I think it depends if an authority site is related to your site. but if not it should help your trust rank may be...

 

This area of my site is highly, highly relevant to the authority site. I have considered that I may be diluting my relevance to this site because the other 2/3 of my site is not as tightly related.

 

I feel the same so that's why this experiment will bring interesting results.. I hope ..

Cheers,

Venetsian.

 

I knew there was this controversy out there. That is why I decided to do this test.

Frankly, I was in the "horde the PageRank" group until quite recently. This test for me will settle it once and for all (or until Google changes their algorithm. Which ever comes first ).

 

To give you an idea on how I currently rank related to this keyword in Google, I have collected a few statistics. Each phrase listed below includes my targeted keyword and 1, 2 or 3 additional words that real people type in:

Rank #1 for 3 two word phrases
Rank #2 for 1 four word phrase
Rank #3 for 1 two word phrase and 1 four word phrase
Rank #4 for 1 two word phrase and 1 three word phrase
Rank #5 for 1 two word phrase and 1 three word phrase
Rank #8 for 1 two word phrase
Rank #10 for 1 two word phrase

Those are my top positions. I also generally get the next position (9 out of the 12 listed). So, when I hold the number 1 and number 2 spots, only the number 1 spot is listed above.

My ranking today for the target keyword is:
Homepage 104 (up from 116)
Page1 about 370 (down from about 360)
Page2 747+ (no change)

And I didn't mention it earlier, but there are 2,240,000 results for this keyword.

I made the changes at 2:30am Pacific Time
Page1 was spidered 6 hours later
Page2 was spidered 4 hours later

Please understand that I am not saying my change has had any impact on my ranking at this point. I am not. From my standpoint this is just adjusting the baseline. I provide this information for full disclosure. You are free to come to your own conclusions.

 

Good experiment. Keep the update plz.

 

Linking to another site will not help your pagerank.

Linking to an authority site may help your trust rank.