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What You Dont' Know About Backlinks Could Hurt You

by Mike Anthony
8 replies
  • SEO
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I've seen a few posts where people share and ask others to share their high PR backlinks in open forums. I some time interject in these conversations and I am sure that people think its because I am in "the biz". I just realized in talking with some forum members that people don't understand why this isn't really a good thing. Although it appear s to be helpful it isn't.

Freely distributed lists of high PR sites are virtually worthless or will become worthless soon enough. I'm sure you will have someone claim otherwise but its a fact and I'll lay out the reasons.

Its an established fact that Pagerank declines and divides according to a Google algorythym. It does so with every link coming from a page. If you get a link on a High PR site - lets say a PR 8 - thats great. Or maybe it isn't. See, that PR8 page is going to be divided by the amount of outgoing links when its passed on to your site. If there are a hundred links coming from that page no matter how you pat yourself on the back at linking from a PR 8 site you really didn't. That PR 8 juice will be divided by all the other posters. Its fashionable and cool to talk about high PR and PR 8 and PR 6 sites or I got this PR9 site but PR is like Cake.

You don't say you go this beautiflul 12 inch cake to take home with you if by the time you wrapped it up to take it home 70 other guests had taken a slice out of it. Thats not a cake to take home. Thats crumbs.


Fact is you would have been better off finding a PR 2 site that no one else or just a few are using than placing your link there. Further the more these lists are shared the more people who are notorious for committing to no restraint will be posting all kinds of links in all kinds of quantitites to those same sites. Its what many complain about with Angela's links even though she tries for that not to happen. soon those sites you shared will become no follow or have the links removed completely.

So my suggestion is next time you want to share backlink sites - don't. Or if you do you should do it by PM. IF not you wll just destroy any value they had for you and any value they would have had for anyone else. For those asking for free backlink lists. You are better off learning to find your own. Those actually have a chance at holding value.
#backlinks #hurt
  • Profile picture of the author InternetMarketingIQ
    And what you think you know can hurt you too.

    The point is most people have no idea how to create value. No value, no rank.
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    • Profile picture of the author Mike Anthony
      Originally Posted by InternetMarketingIQ View Post

      And what you think you know can hurt you too.

      The point is most people have no idea how to create value. No value, no rank.
      Not sure how that relates. Even if you do create value on the sites that you backlink from if there are too many people using the site or page the juice will be divided up so much there is little point (at least in regard to PR).
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  • Profile picture of the author sarah_may
    Well you don't need to care about your incoming links as you can not bound them but make sure to not have any bad links on your site and focus on building quality incoming links from your side.
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  • Profile picture of the author edgray
    Some very interesting points.

    PR as a ranking factor has been in decline for sometime so it's best not to focus too much on it anyway.

    Domain Authority seems to be growing in importance in the Google algorithm.

    But I think the whole confusion comes from people talking about "PR sites" at all - PageRank is assigned to PAGES, not sites. So, on a so-called PR9 site, it's the index page that has the PR, the inner pages on the site might have none at all. A PR 5 directory for example will most likely end up passing over 0.001 PR to your link, due to that PR 5 being spread between that many internal pages and thousands of outbound links.
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    • Profile picture of the author Mike Anthony
      Originally Posted by edgray View Post

      Some very interesting points.
      But I think the whole confusion comes from people talking about "PR sites" at all - PageRank is assigned to PAGES, not sites. So, on a so-called PR9 site, it's the index page that has the PR

      I think most people in this section of warriors completely understands that. I know they do because I have been in those discussions. Truth be told there generally is a correlation between pagerank and authority. One can and does contribute to the other. There is a reason that the authority sites we do know have high PR. It might not be a one to one kind of thing but its there. I think you miss that people refer to Pagerank as a metric they can quantify where as authority is somewhat a Google mystery. we know even less of that secret sauce. When I speak of a PR 9 site I am referring to a site that owns a PR 9 page.

      Its the same reference point as saying my site gets 10,000 visitors a month. True a site may in fact not get that but just one page but thats how people talk. I think sometimes people try and make a point of the whole PR page and site thing without reference to how people naturally communicate.

      Fact is whether you point to authority or Pagerank having links on pages or sites with multitudes of others is bound to hurt. My OP was just to consider that when sharing backlinks in an open forum. Google undoubtedly has algorythm for determing how multiple links from an authority site's page are treated.

      I think its pretty obvious that Google does not have an unlimited amount of votes a site or page can give out to other site. Its an algorythm that helps them to identify link farms.

      I don't care whether you point to authority, pagerank or even think they have have no connection - sharing links in open forum degrades the value of the link as it is spammed.
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  • Profile picture of the author Zeus66
    I think InternetMarketingIQ was referring to the quality of your own pages being a major factor, not just how many and where you get backlinks.

    It looks to me (I'm not expert, just my own observations) like Google is getting away from links as so heavy a determining factor in rankings, and moving more toward things like how fast a site loads and how long visitors sent by Google stay on the page in question. I like this, especially the latter factor.

    I think Google created a monster by relying so heavily on links in its algorithm. They had to have known that this would cause webmasters to go out on link building crusades to game the system. Perhaps they figured they could stay a step ahead with their brainpower. I don't know. But in reality, it was tiny Google (relatively speaking) vs. millions of webmasters, many of whom eat and breathe this stuff. I think Google should have known they'd lose that battle. I think Caffeine is their white flag, and long overdue.

    Rankings should always have been mostly about the quality of what is on your pages, not how many "votes" you get via backlinks. In my opinion. I think that's what IMIQ was driving at, but he'll correct me if I'm wrong.

    John
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  • Profile picture of the author JoshH
    I also think that way too many people put too much emphasis on PR. Many times I have talked to people who would turn down a great link that is niche related on a low PR site, because it wasn't high enough of a PR.

    People should stop and think that a site might be Low PR today, but that might not be the case down the road. And that high pr site could go down as well.
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  • Profile picture of the author MarkAse
    I don't think this should be a question of either high PR forum profile links or other links like blog comments, in niche forum signatures etc.

    We should all be doing a combination of all of the above. At the end of the day we need to create links but also content both on our sites and off. Google is always going to be changing the way SERPS are calculated, if we provide quality content and links we'll all be fine in the long run....even if our SERPS take longer to build to the first page than they once did using BL packets.
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    My current project, the Uncorked Ventures Wine Club. More coming soon, here.

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