A High PR Link That Sticks!

That's because the ultimate source of all your beliefs is the urban myth school of internet marketing, as regurgitated by people promoting themselves and their services, Zannix.

Not this time, I'm afraid: this issue's so simple and clear-cut that I've never bothered to compile any. Everything I've ever learned about it from "official" sources has only ever confirmed what I'd already seen for myself (as had others whose knowledge of this subject my own experiences have taught me to trust and respect). As I said above, there's no mystery about it.

If you do what I and large numbers of others here do, and look in the first place at authoritative sources such as Google's WebMaster Blog, videos of Matt Cutts "explaining stuff to the masses" and so on, rather than second-hand information in forums where people are promoting SEO services and endlessly regurgitating (in support of them) every urban myth of internet marketing you've ever heard in your life, and then some, you'll have an entirely new perspective.

This is similar to the conversation you and I have been having, on and off for months now, about "duplicate content". It says openly on Google's WebMaster blog that "duplicate content doesn't cause your site to be penalized" (I've linked to it in other threads - those are the exact words), but all the people who get their information from the zeitgeist instead of from an authoritative source still imagine that their sites will be penalized for duplicate content over article submissions, and that they'll somehow benefit if they "spin" them, and that it's a good idea to use automated mass-submissions to article directories, and all sorts of crap and nonsense like this ... and that's because the zeitgeist is formed by people who are promoting so-called SEO services and have a direct financial motivation in perpetuating and propagating all these ill-informed and grotesquely misguided beliefs which actually serve, collectively, to prevent people from earning a living. The same applies, to some extent (not to the same extent, I admit), to page ranks.

This stuff is self-evident, Zannix: you can verify it for yourself. Most people just don't bother, partly because it's easier just to repeat things they've been told by people selling services. They must all be "experts", after all, right? They say so themselves, and you can't get more authentic than that, can you?!

I'm very much hoping that you'll take this post in the amicable spirit in which it's intended and appreciate that absolutely no impoliteness is implied. I mean it only helpfully: I'm (still!!) trying to remove your self-imposed blindfold and show you the real world, but it isn't easy at all.

By the way, I now happen to have a large number of PR-5 pages of my own (just from getting my articles syndicated to relevant sites) ... but their backlinks aren't much good to my other niche sites because they're not relevant to those sites, and only someone with a financial interest in selling backlinks would pretend that they are - or perhaps someone naive who'd just bought them and had instead an emotional investment in not having wasted all his money. If someone offers you a choice between ten pr-0/pr-1 backlinks from sites relevant to yours, or ten pr-3 backlinks from random sites, will you know which to buy?