Backlinking: One juicy steak or 100 cocktail weenies?

[SurviveUnemployment]

As a ruthless businessman, I'm not in the habit of giving things away for free, especially advice and especially not to my competitors, of whom I am sure there are a few among you. The good spirit and camaraderie of Ye Goode Olde' Warrior Forum must be rubbing off on me.

This is a two-for-one free lesson. It's worth way more than ten bucks. It's probably worth more than the last 12 Frank Kern videos you watched combined. (Of course, if you already know what I'm about to tell you, it's worth nothing.)

The first part of the lesson: Page Rank only matters when it's another site linking to yours, and then it matters a lot. One PR5 link (not watered down by 5000 other links on the referring page, of course) from a related site will cover all your backlinking needs, even for competitive terms.

The second part of the lesson, the part that you can put to use right now: When it comes to backlinking, EZA is not the be-all-and-end-all. Links from articles there generally don't even show up when you do a "link:www.mysite.com."

Here's the takeaway: Buzzle articles are PR2 right out of the gate. (If you already knew that, sorry for the hype.) The links are also not as watered down by jillions of other links on the page.

EZA articles are PR0 or PR N/A. Sometimes you can get them up to PR1 if you backlink like crazy but why bother wasting your time backlinking to EZA? You're already doing them a huge favor by giving them content.

This is not to say that you shouldn't submit to EZA -- you should. Traffic from there is great. There is more potent link juice hanging low on the vine, though.This is not to say that you shouldn't submit to EZA -- you should. Traffic from there is great. There is more potent link juice hanging low on the vine, though.
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PS -- Third "bonus" part of this free advice: Good SEO tools will put the big juicy steaks right in front of your face. That's all I'm saying about that. I'm not about to give away the store, here!

[bgmacaw]

Originally Posted by SurviveUnemployment

One PR5 link (not watered down by 5000 other links on the referring page, of course) from a related site will cover all your backlinking needs, even for competitive terms.

Until you lose that "holy grail" link and then you're screwed.

[LilBlackDress]

Nice post SU, a couple questions.....

How do you know related really matters? I have read some of Terry Kyles thread and the indication is it does not seem to matter if the site is related or not. As the site with the links on non related sites is doing really well. (at least it was last time I checked).

Also with regards to Buzzle...can you post article on Buzzle and then elsewhere or does it need to be unique to Buzzle?

[SurviveUnemployment]

Originally Posted by bgmacaw

Until you lose that "holy grail" link and then you're screwed.

Not really. Usually that "holy grail" link is enough to get you over the hump. I like to let other people do my backlinking for me, and I find that other bloggers will still link to a post they found on teh Google that is related to the post they're writing. Straight-up sploggers won't, but I don't want those bad neighborhood links anyway.

Plus you drop a few articles on Buzzle and other places that give you good, pure PR2+ links along the way, and you can hold that spot.

Lil' Black Dress:

Google has done a few videos where they explain their drive toward "contextual relevance." It's the best way to weed out link spammers, when you think about it. Totally unrelated links seem to hurt, actually. I tried this with one of my sites -- just getting links from everywhere -- and it never popped page 2 which is highly unusual for me.

Experience has shown me that one big-time heavy link solves everything because it puts you on top long enough to pull some other links.

Buzzle, by the way, requires unique content, but I've gotten some quick spins up there. Buzzle's just an example of a way to get a juicier link. This is why it's important to use SEO tools to save time -- you get a list of link targets for your keywords, complete with PR, then go out and get the links.

[bgmacaw]

Originally Posted by SurviveUnemployment

Straight-up sploggers won't, but I don't want those bad neighborhood links anyway.

[sweetfranky]

Great article, I got 1 really high PR link to one of my subpages and bang! Top 3 position on all targeted keywords.

[Tom Goodwin]

Originally Posted by SurviveUnemployment

Here's the takeaway: Buzzle articles are PR2 right out of the gate. (If you already knew that, sorry for the hype.)

Really? I just checked the 10 most recent articles on Buzzle and they are all N/R.

[Tom Goodwin]

Originally Posted by SurviveUnemployment

Google has done a few videos where they explain their drive toward "contextual relevance."

Google could say that the earth was the center of the universe, but that doesn't make it so I don't think a video from Google proves or disproves whether relevancy matters.

[Andy Fletcher]

Originally Posted by thmgoodw

Really? I just checked the 10 most recent articles on Buzzle and they are all N/R.

The 10 most recently ones may not even be indexed yet let alone assigned PR. But that said I've checked back through a load of previous ones that do have a PR and they all seem to be 0 for me.

Anyone got counter examples? I really didn't check that many.

[fir3d]

wouldnt you need to wait for the pr update before any visible change in pr? They could be worth pr 2 but you have to wait for the next update.

[fir3d]

ok cool I found one.

buzzle.com/articles/dental-implant-insurance-coverage-for-dental-implants.html
Published: 7/4/2009

Cant tell if thats july or may depending on where you are from.
But its pr3 and yahoo shows no links from external domains.

[Bob Monie]

Google have only updated their visible toobar pagerank twice in 2009. Your obviously not going to see the PR until the next update in 6 months (Thats if they have another update).

Just because you cant see the PageRank doesnt mean a page doesnt have any. Every page that is indexed by Google is given a small percentage of pagerank (more than zero but less than 1). A webpages PR is increasing and decreasing all the time. As soon as a backlink to your site is spidered and indexed into Google, it turns on the link juice tap from that link. Since internal links are counted in Google as backlinks to a certain degree, sites with great internal link structures and a huge number of indexed pages (like article directories) can allow for a flood of link juice flowing to new indexed articles.

In buzzle.com's case, every indexed article immediately gets a pr of 1, 2 or 3.

You may be asking, what determines how much PR an article is given from the start. Well the answer is quite easy... answer: the niche your article is in (keywords in article title defines your niche). The larger and more competitive your niche, the more PR the article is given.

Do you want to know how i came to this conclusion?

Easy, go take a look at the article fir3d found at Dental Implant Insurance Coverage for Dental Implants

Scroll down the bottom of the article and you find a huge list of related articles. This is where all that link juice is flowing from article to article. The more articles that are related to your niche, the more times your article link appears on those articles.

A very competitive niche has always got very high PR sites with lots of backlinks fighting for top ranks. This means that those high pr sites link to these articles, inturn also giving them more PR than the smaller, less competitive niche articles.

Ezinearticles have a different internal linking structure than Buzzle.com. Instead of a random related article list, Ezine lists recent posts in that category, most viewed articles in the category (last 90 days), and most published articles in the category.

This means the link juice from the recent article list is short lived and the 30 articles that take up the most viewed and most published section get all the link juice from every other article in that category. Its like the rich getting richer by stealing from the poor.

Buzzle link juice seems to be more evenly spread between the articles. If thats the case, links from buzzle articles would be better for SEO than Ezine due to higher chance of the articles recieving good PR (unless your ezine articles are in the most viewed or published lists).

This is just my opinion from a quick observation. I have no idea how Buzzle ranks their related articles, either being random, title similarities, views or ratings. This means I could very well be wrong so take my post with a grain of salt.