I've been offered text links on two PR8 sites, but am unsure if they will be of real benefit in the short term. I'm looking to improve my MSN and Yahoo SERPS, and to hopefully speed up the process of getting out of the google sandbox. Would PR8 links help?
Yes, I wouldn't turn down PR8 links either. I am not too sure what you mean by "offered" .... do you mean for free?? If yes, then I'll take a couple of links too! Anyway, getting back to the point: Yes, PR8 links can do wonders for your rankings as well as your PR. IMO, the only short term difference it will make is to get your (complete) site indexed very quickly. IMO, the serps are affected only when Google updates internal PR. Of course, there will be a lot of guys here who will disagree with me. Anyway, the point I am trying to make here is that you should try and get the link for as long as possible, i.e. a few months, one year or more instead of just one month as I don't think that will help you much. Now, before you go ahead and pay for the link, check the following: 1. You want to know why the site is a PR8, so do a "link:www.site.com" search in Google, Yahoo and MSN. In most cases, this should bring up a few thousand links in all 3 SEs. If the search returns, 10 (say) links or so then go through these very carefully as it could mean that the site has one (or only a few) high PR links. This can be a problem if the person selling you the link has bought these for a short period of time and stops the subsctiption as soon as he/she sells links on his/her site. In this case, once the subscription stops and Google know that the high PR link to "that site" doesn't exist anymore, it's PR will drop and so will yours and you will lose the benefit of the PR8 link. 2. The next thing you should check is a "site:www.site.com/yourlinkpage.htm" search in Google for the page that you are getting a link on. Then, look at the Google cache for that page to ensure that the entire page's content is being cached, i.e. the browser can "see" the page properly. If a site's using frames etc. then sometimes browsers can have trouble looking at all the content and if they can't see the content, they can't see your link, so you don't get any benefit. Anyway, do all this and then buy it, I guess. Good luck! (Of course you are more than welcome to share this opportunity with us too) Regards, dfsweb