Hello and thank you for looking at my post! I'm a newbie and was wondering if I understand how PR works and was hoping I could run down what I think and someone could tell me if it makes any sense please? Let's say I create a new site today and a PR6 site links to it and nowhere else. I think that would impart a value of (approximately) 93,000 and make the new site a PR4 as soon as the next Google update. Now if on the first page of this new PR4 site (with 3,000 in power), I linked to an internal page, that internal page would become a PR3 (with 555). And if I used that PR3 page to externally link out to 5 sites, each of those could be PR2s. And doing this does not detract from the value of the pages that have the links, other than to reduce the amount of power they have to impart to other sites. Am I understanding this correctly? A site has a certain PR that it gets from backlinks and you can split it up internally and externally as I detailed above?
It's a good idea to split up your links externally and internally, but I wouldn't count on jumping up to being a PR4 site over night. Even if you get a link from a PR6 site that's not really how it works. It would most likely take a few months (even years) of quality link building to get a site ranking of 6. Site age is a big factor in site ranking, so there is a small chance that a site that is a couple weeks old will have any ranking whatsoever. If you can get a link from a PR6 site then thats great, but don't expect your ranking to go up. I'm assuming you might be talking about an article directory like Ezinearticles with a site rank of 6 and this will not increase your site rank, unless a ton of people click on your link. Just try to keep building your links and in 6 or 12 months you might see a jump in site ranking.
Hi Jwarnimo, I really appreciate the response! I have some sites that are as old as 10 years, I just haven't been working on them, as much. And they already have links -- I was really just trying to keep my question simple. I'm wondering if I did get a big link how it would be divided up. Would a big PR6 linking in really make the site a PR4? And once it was a PR4, does the "value" of the site's link PR for internal and external links pass the same way?
That really could seem unnatural ("a PR6 site links to it and nowhere else"), so don't count on Google trusting it (I have links from a PR4 page to one of my sites, but even after the update it's still PR0). PR is an irrelevant number that's easily manipulated and faked. You should really ignore it and just be concerned with links from trusted/authoritative sources irrespective of their PR (even PR0). A solid vote is what counts. These will bring you traffic, regardless of PR. Good luck!
Thanks mate, that's good advice! I think too that the amount of time you've had the links, the age of your website, the content of the link sources versus the destination all play into it also. I'm just trying to get a handle on where my "advertising dollar" is best spent.
The best thing is... don't spend on links. At least in terms of dollars (directly). A better way is to spend time on developing a strategy and good content to link from (or back to). I'm not the biggest advocate of guest posting (as it's unnatural). I can't imagine it's carrying as much weight as people think, but I'd rather do that than pay for a link (or spam a blog). There are other ways too (make some infographics, content people want to link to, SEOmoz has some great posts on doing this and even a case study in YOUmoz). Generally, on SEO blogs like that you'll find plenty of whats to get legitimate and quality links.