The Truth about linking -- Dirk Johnson

HI schlottke.

If your question is not rhetorical it has to do with the 900+ PR 4 or better on topic ibls. If it were in jest pardon moi.

 

I don't have enough data to make a firm stand on either side of the "PR leak" issue, but I do know this:

I converted *thousands* of outbound non-reciprocal links on several of my web sites from HTML to JavaScript.

This change has had no noticable effect on any search engine. I've been running this way for several months. It seems like it's time for me to switch back to HTML links.

 

Great linking strategy concepts Compar. Thank you very much.

I was wondering what your thoughts were on Anchor text from inbound links? Page specific keywords?

I was also wondering what your thoughts were on title content. Few relevant words that are page specific?

Thanks Again,

Bob

 

In my opinion the anchor text from a IBL is the single most important part of an IBL. A lot of people worry about the PR, but the PR of the page doesn't tell Google what the link is about or relevant to. So if you want a link to have any chance of advancing your page in the SERPs it has to have good anchor text. You should always use you prime keyword phrase or phrases as anchor text.

I'm not sure what "page specific" keywords are. Do you mean specific to the page the link is pointing at? If that is the case then they are anchor text aren't they?

If you mean specific to the page the link is on I don't think it really matters today. Eventually Google may start to give extra relevancy value to a link from a thematically related page, but I don't think they have this prefected yet.

Links are about anchor text today.

I assume you are talking about a page title that is found in the head section of the code. Aside from the value of IBL this is probably the single most important element of a web site from the SE's point of view. This is the headline. This tells the SEs what the page is about. So it should contain your prime keyword phrase. Don't waste a title with things like "Welcome to mydomain.com". That doesn't tell anyone what the site is about.

Hope those are the answers you were looking for.

 

Actually I have my pr drop on numerous sites when i added outbound links

enough so that it doesn't seem like a coincidence, I havn't cared because my rankings have just gottem better

I also had some sites that had link directorys on and the main link directory index pages I label "links.php" like a dumb ass

Google didn't follow the links to the links pages , so none of my link partners was receiving pr ,(the link pages where not even in the index) the main pages all where pr5

So in order to make up for my error I linked all the linkpages directly from the front page , next update all my linkpages went pr3-4 and the main index/front paes went to pr4

 

Rankings are not really directly related to the green toolbar

I have many sites that ranked very well and only have a pr5 where as much of the compettion has much higher pr

 

Adding outbound links which are not reciprocated does decrease your page rank mathematically. Arguing that is pointless because Page Rank is a mathematical formula and anyone who can read and has graduated from pre calc can see the relationship. Having said that, there is more than one way to get to Rome.

Many of the different parts of Google's algo conflict with one another so as to make it more difficult to reverse engineer. Digital Point has so much page rank that it gets ranked for a lot of stuff just based on pure page rank. Of coarse the thousands of links and forum posts make it a page rank power house. So realistically, Shawn could rank for a lot of things without content and outbound links. But obviously, those things help your rankings to a degree. What degree depends on your implementation. At what point do extra out links to relevant documents out weigh the advantages of conserving page rank and vice versa...that's where the art of SEO comes into play. But to say that Outlinks don't negatively affect your page rank is wrong. However, the amount of PR bleed may be nothing compared to the boost you get from linking to theme related sites that Google, Yahoo and MSN consider relavant and important. BUt they are two different calculations.

I am often suprised how people make assumptions about the algo based on unrelated behaviors. And how many people have never actually READ the Page Rank, Hilltop and Topic Sensitive White Papers. There is A LOT of good information about SEO in those.

 

I don't get it .......... if it's basic math, maybe a link out to a 'rated site' results in a score of '+1' and a reciprocal link from / to a 'rated site' scores as '+2'.

One thing i have seen very often is that a site with an 'unexpectedly' high PR (based on content and my own 'personal' opinion) will often have a couple of links out to 'Google', 'Yahoo' or maybe a related 'high profile', 'high PR' site. I can't see that the two things aren't connected in someway.

 

The math may hold true for PR loss, but Google appears to count anchor text links at least as highlighted parts of the body copy. Aaron Wall at www.SEObook.com uses this method frequently, and as there are plenty of pages ranking well with outbound links.

 

I agree that many pages with outbound links rank better than those without. As I said they are two competing algo characteristics. For example (TOTALLY HYPOTHETICAL):

If each point of page rank were 10 points and each outbound link to a releated webpage was 1 point what would make the most sense to do for any given webpage. Add 100 out bound links right? Unless each outbound link caused the page rank to drop by 2 points. But because no one knows the actual point structure of Google or Yahoo it becomes a guessing game, which is exactly what the search engines want.

I am not trying to discourage outbound linking. Only stating that it does decrease page rank and that page rank still factors in the google algo.

 

Wrong, outbound links only dilute the amount of PR being passed to each link on the page. It does NOT decrease the PR of the page.

In my opinion, the apparent increase of PR when adding outbound links is a coincidence.

That is close to the best article on linking I've ever read. Thank you for sharing it compar.

 

No, you are wrong. Because, as you have said, outbound links dilute the amount of PR being passed to each link, the amount of PR available to that page for each subsequent iteration of the page rank formula after the initial calculation will be lower. This isn't a debatable issue man. Read the Page Rank white paper. It's in the formula. The math has not changed.

Page Rank is an iterative process. It takes a few cycles until you get convergence. But as I say, it's somewhat of a mute point because the benefit you get from the outbound links (especially in Yahoo) will most often compensate for the potential page rank that you might lose.

 

I hardly ever take advice from discussion forums about SEO strategies. I have 2 sites that are #1 for their keyword phrase and the keyword phrase is fairly competitive, sometimes 29,000,000 search results. The fact of the matter is reciprocal links work. I don't really care about PR. (oh my gosh, an seo guy saying he doesn't care about PR!) The only reason I even consider it is it helps me to know that the page is spidered by google. What I am more concerned about is whether the copy or links on the page itself relate to my keyword phrase. It bugs me when link partners will decline a trade based on a new page in my site that hasn't updated PR. I know it'll have a PR of 4 or above in the next update and then they'll want to be on the page.

I usually don't say much about this stuff, I mean why give away what really works to your competition, but after reading the letter I just had to vent... just a little.

Adam

 

even a kid knows about it huh!

 

just a quick note: thanks for sharing this with us compar!

 

Take any site that has a minimum of 100 back links in G and places between position 25 and 40 in SERP's, and add 1 PR7 link (clean) and 2 x PR6 links (clean) with a 1,000,000 search ratio on KW's and watch! That site will go to first page in less than 2 weeks. I do it all the time. Clean, one - way links with high PR works. The rest I agree with and that was a very well-done and very informative article.

 

What is a 1,000,000 search ration on KW ?

 

this is a well written article I agree, its simple common sense surely the bust thing for bew users is to have usefull links on your site and they will vote with their feet

 

Indeed the author of this letter seems to know what he is talking about from experience, day in and day out. I question this though

In the Google Patent there is mention of link bursts. Is it possible you can accumulate too many links in a short period causing a flag to raise?

 

I doubt it. It goes back to statement that if you could hurt you competition by linking to them we would all link the crap out of our competition until they vanished from the serps. I would at least