What are your opinions on this, I was just having this discussion with my colleague, In your opinion what would be better to place emphasis on, we both agree that high pagerank is better than a low pagerank, but how to quantify this? For example in a link building campaign focusing on links from relevent pages only, would you prefer to have, (a) 4 relevent PR5 links or (b) 10 relevent PR3 links Whjat would you rather place priority on?
10 X PR3 for me. One drops and you won't notice it as much as 1 x PR5 dropping. It's also more 'votes' for you. Also increases the chance of actual targeted traffic though it obviously 'depends' a lot. Also gives you a higher chance you;ll end up with 10 x PR 4 in a few months, automatically.
I will go for: (b) 10 relevent PR3 links As tops30 said its more votes to your site and the chance that they will increase to PR 4+ is good.
I also agree with TOPS3O regarding the traffic. But about PR3 becomeing PR5, I think there is also the opposite way, so it can get down and you will get 10 PR1 links, which isn't good at all!
Most sites owned by somebody smart enough to be selling links (I assume you are buying the links otherwise you could just have them all for free) are likely to increase in PR and popularity. Unless they are just to make money from link sales of course. My main factor at the moment is ranking in google. If a site is selling links and has a good ranking in google for a related keyword then its value can be double that of a similar site thats not ranked in google.
from Wikipedia: “Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.†To me, it means: higher PR+ relevancy + other factors = higher ranking lower PR+ relevancy + other factors = lower ranking so, the more relevant links from high PR pages, the better for the page rank of my page = better SERPS the question is how to calculate the value of link. Tools like "link price calculator" price link from PR3 page as $2/month, and one from PR4 page worth as much as $30/month http://www.webconfs.com/link-value.php So my answer is 4 PR4 relevant links are better value than 10 PR3. More on PR: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Page_rank http://www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank/
That wasn't the question though. What does this mean to you? few higher PR+ relevancy + other factors = ??? ranking more lower PR+ relevancy + other factors = ??? ranking
I'm still unsure. If I was going to come down one way or another it would probably be for higher quantities over higher pagerank. I think the actual Pagerank of a pge helps you minimally in the SERPS. PR is itself being a product of IBLs as are the rankings themselves. i.e. IBLs + Relevancy + anchor text = rankings + PR IBLs = PR I know the above is a generalisation, though I can only see it not being true for sites that don't rank for any competitive search terms. I don't think the link price of a link can be taken as an indicator of it's value in ranking terms. The link prices a in my view inflated by webmasters that place too much importance on PR leading to the higher prices. I'm still fairly undecided on this problem. It's so difficult as it's almost impossible to quantify the value of the additional PR as a trade off against the additional cost of the link. I'm still open to opinions and arguements!
10 PR3's More is better IMO. Just b/c a site is a PR 5 doesn't mean it will deliver more traffic to yours. I also agree with the idea that these could become 10 PR 4-5 with the PR update.
In my opinion, the difference between PR3 and PR5 is a lot greater than the difference between 4 links and 10 links. I would even take 4 PR5 links over 30 PR3 links.
There's an old saying: "I'd rather have 1% from 100 men than 100% from 1 man." The logic is that if one man goes down, you still have 99%. But you wanted a way to quantify this, so we'll use the simple estimation formula for passing PR from http://www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank/. Assume each page has 20 outgoing links (this really won't matter much for our puposes though). PR 5 links PR Passed=(1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) PR Passed=.15 + .85 (5/20) PR Passe=.3625 4*.3625=1.45 (because we have 4 PR5 links) PR 3 links PR Passed=(1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) PR Passed=.15 + .85 (3/20) PR Passed=.2775 10*.2775=2.775 (because we have 10 PR 3 links) So, only looking at PR, 10 PR 3 links are better than 4 PR 5 links. However, as others have also pointed out, the PR 3 pages will probably grow over time. The PR 5 pages probably won't grow PR at the same percentage, so they are less likely to be good "investments" over time. And finally, just like buying more lottery tickets improves your chances of winning, hjaving more inks improves your chances of being found. If you had to rely solely on links for traffic, there is a greater chance that you would be found with 10 links than 4. Does that quantify it sufficiently for you?
I totally agree with your logic, and it's correct, the links will pass PR. Though I don't actually believe this is a mjor factor in the rankings. I suppose I'm asking if the effect of the extra relevent links on the SERPS (votes if you will) will outweigh the extra PR that is passed. I've still not seen anything to convince me either way, though if pushed I'd have to come sown on the side of the extra links. Maybe I'll look at doing a test to settle it once and for all.
I was hoping that I could get more data about the effects of backlinks on SERPs by using the neat-o tool at webuildpages (www.webuildpages.com/neat-o/). I wanted to use a page about George Bush(http://www.whitehouse.gov/president/gwbbio.html) because it is the first result for the search term "failure". Since this word does not appear on the page, it must have attained that position by a large number of backlinks with the anchor text "failure". Indeed, Google shows 3820 backlinks! Unfortunately, the neat-o tool only finds one backlink, and it can't grab the anchor text from it. It may be broken. The backlink analyzer at http://www.webconfs.com/anchor-text-analysis.php seems to do a better job, but is less user friendly. It reported on 90 of the links, and of those 40 had anchor text that couldn't be resolved (possibly pictures) and 23 contained the word failure. I did not look at the PR of the linking pages however.
I think the way to do it would be to create two pages with the same text but two different nonsensical keywords that are placed in the same positions on the page. Then send links from pages (from the same site) in the numbers I've quoted above. I don't think it'll give a definitive answer, but hopefully it'll give me a better idea in the PR Vs Quantity battle Anyone got any comments on this before I start?
I agree with Tops30 too! I have over 2000 backlinks for one site ranging from PR0 to PR7. I don't really get bothered that much if some links drop out due to so many being live. Keeps things consistent and traffic remains stable.