One of the most difficult tasks as a marketing strategist is trying to explain to my clients why something works and why something doesn't work. So many people are so dead set on believing the ways of the "wannabe marketers" that they discount anything that sounds a little more difficult and assume it can't be so. I'm here to tell you, that it most definitely can be so. There are so many tricks out there that are "guaranteed" to work and get you into the top 10 of google, the top 5, the top whatever... but it just isn't realistic to be able to expect that. Those marketers who promise you that, are really good at getting up front money and running off with it, and that's really all they are good at. LINK PAGES / FARMS OH MY! One thing that most people do not know, but they think they know a lot about is link pages. Link pages are fine, if you are the one doing the linking, HOWEVER, if you are the one that is linked to from a links page, then you could take a hit. Google is always changing and one of the ways in which it has changed, has been to implement a system, which detects link pages, essentially by loads of outgoing links and no real content. Because there is so many outgoing links, google will then determine that this page is essentially worthless and will do what it can to ensure that it doesn't show up in search results, thus assigning a negative attribute to it. Now, all of those sites that are linked to from this links page, have a negative page linking to it. This is obviously going to lower their score somewhat as well. The more negative attributable pages that you have linking to your site, the harder you are going to have to work to make up that ground. WHAT IS GOOD??? If you are looking for good linkage, the best is anything that is mainpage or on a HIGH content page. So if there's a whole lot of writing, and very few links, then you are probably in a good spot, especially if there's a high PR on that page. What I would recommend is avoiding the link pages in favor of a much better spot somewhere on a content page, with as few other links on it as possible. That is just about the only way that you are truly going to make out in the link swapping game. Did this help you? Let me know!
Not true.... In fact the opposite is true.. You allude to that in the rest of this paragraph, but Link pages ARE NOT fine if you are doing the linking. This could hurt you. On the other hand, it won't hurt you if you are linked to. If this is true then you would see black hats finding the spammiest link farms out there and post compititor links. As far was the second part your wrote, I couldn't agree more... I believe that links within content (surround by non-linked text) are given more weight than links surrounded by links...
I think a lot of what has to do with the link page, is maybe not so much a negative impact, but maybe a neutral no impact kind of impact. So essentially, it is worthless. Maybe I should stress that. If you have thousands of link pages linking to you, it has the same impact as say 1 good PR5.
I don't think so, I would say thousands of low and no pr links is much better then a few medium pr links But I have never done an scientific analysis on it
I thought it worked like the richter scale: 10 pr0 = 1 pr1 10 pr1 = 1 pr2 etc. 1 million pr0 = 1 pr6 I'm no expert and this is over simplified as the amount of links on the rated page affect it as well as I'm sure hundreds of other variable do.
I'm not too sure too... What about thousands of successful niche directories - they are nothing but collection of links but they are highly ranked in Google?