PR is not worthless. I happen to own 2 PR 6 sites that are on the top of major keywords. They started as PR 4 and slowly climbled to the top by obtaining PR 6. Why is PR not worthless??? Many reasons. my income exploded when I got to PR 6. As a PR 6, your site is spidered on the hour. You can take a sub word like "blue widgets and it will appear within 2 hours in the SERPS. Try doing that with a PR 3 site. You can also adjust the keyword ratio on the page to pick your spot precisely in the SERPS. I happen to like position 3 so I keep my keyword ratio inflated because if I were to set it at around 7% then I would be right on the top and I don't like that position. Try doing that with a PR 4 site As a PR 6, your interior pages are likely going to be PR 5s. Because of this you can take your interior pages higher in the SERPS than a PR 4 index page of another site. PR worthless??? I owe a majority of my fine lifestyle to PR. Thank you PR. You have paid for my new car.
I think Google does not totally devalue link exchanges. Related link exchanges are still very important. Some people are saying they also devalue bought links, article directory links, directory links. If that was the case, then how on earth would people bring in traffic through the search engines? Not everyone can generate a ton of natural links and the only option would then be is to advertise to drive traffic.
I mean buying and selling links. It must be more effective than 3rd way exchanges 3rd way they can be chacked up by google as I explained earlier in this thread, right? If so then how come that so many people have been getting good rankings from Co-Op and Linkvault? How can people that only rely on unauthoritical sites get high rankings?
Just look at Link Exchanges as one more source of traffic. Good anchor text and a link on a website with related/complementary theme would drive traffic to your site. I have done this and we are receiving nice hits from websites we got links from.
am I missing something here? even if link exchange is worthless to google, at least it give some weight to Yahoo & MSN.
i don't think it's worthless. it depends if your and the other's site (link exchanger/link exchangee) are semantically related or content-wise related to one another. plus, if your sites aren't linked to bad neighborhoods or link farms--the old school black hat thing.
I wasn't saying "go for link exchange and forget everything else." I was saying use a mixture of strategies. Make your links appear natural (which basically means do the same thing for your e-biz that happens naturally over time for non-commercial sites.) And about hiding links and cheating: I have an advanced SEO tool in place that checks for rel=nofollows and many other things to make sure all my links are passing their PR to me as well as a chunk of traffic. Your article is OK, but you haven't convinced me just by saying link exchanges are worthless. Warkot Exactly -- link to related sites, they link to you, you get some traffic and PageRank (not that it's too important), and Google determines your site's theme as you mean it, as a side effect. Absolutely. It depends where your traffic comes from. I very much like your ratio of link sources. That's what I'm always trying to do: 30-40% IBLs come from relevant link exchange, other links from other sources, mostly pure one-way. I'm sure your income explosion is not a direct result of a high PR, but of SEO strategy you pursue I agree with what you say, the only thing I object to is people chasing toolbar PR for toolbar PR's sake, forgetting about theme relevancy and many other successful SEO factors. Toolbar PR is still pretty worthless to look at and pass judgement. Real PR matters, of course. It's hard to make an argument when you put it this way I agree. If it's a blog, links will come naturally (takes time though), but organic traffic isn't gonna come to commercial sites without some effort on the part of site owners, so smart link exchanges are still important. As if the only reason for people doing link exchange was to raise that toolbar PR! There is definitely a benefit if the link is relevant, improves your SERPs and gives you traffic, don't you think? Personally, I don't even think toolbar PageRank is the most important thing you should take into account when exchanging links. Not by a long shot. I go with theme relevancy most of the time. Warkot
Can't but agree. Link popilarity in your topical community is an extremely important factor, and its importancy is still growing IMO.
Well to explain link exchange and what not, look at DP. Did they pay for link exchange? NO... They made a site, made good tools, and linked to useful site... they people found them and liked them and linked to them. That's how they became popular, not because they exchanged 100,000 links. When I make web pages, I don't think about SEO... but I do think about my visitors. And when they are happy, magicly I'm on top of Search Engines. People who link exchange are like telemarketers, they think it's good but it's really not. It only annoyes people (aka search engine in link exchange) and gets the weak to fall for the scam.
Personally, I don't think the article is too great either... But honestly, if you could come up with well-weighted arguments explaining why you think the article is, apparently, of a faecal nature, you would have made a much more significant contribution to this forum with that specific post What I'm trying to say is can you back it up? Warkot
Link Exchanges are not worthless for one prime reason mainly. People can actually exchange traffic, which means more uniques. IT
DP got popular in an SE environment that I think was very different from today's, and it didn't happen overnight either. Also, it's a forum, not an online biz. For commercial (especially small biz) sites just sitting there and waiting for links is a non-option. They need to be proactive in link building. That, of course, does not imply you should exchange 100k links, but that certainly doesn't mean link exchanges are worthless. However, I agree with you in that you should always create a Website with primarily your visitors in mind, not (just) search engines, with their ever-changing algos. Warkot
I disagree with this topic -- infact I think it's stupid. Link excahnges are very valueable, unless you are exchanging links with sites not related to yours at all. I have exchangd over 350 links with a new site I started a few months ago. All exchanges were relevent, I got to the first page for some very competitive keywords.
Hm, could you say did you have other links? Directories? PR? Bought links? Asking for links? Others? Maybe it wasn't due to link exchanges.
the article is shit because for many months I was making about 10k a month of sites whose only links where link exchanges
Link exchanging is very important for me... I hate link farm, but every other link is good! There isn't only google! No link no traffic no cash