a question about backlinks and pagerank

9 replies
I have a quick question I hope someone can answer. I have a client who bought a few backlinks from a site that he said has a pr8. He paid a lot for these links.

When I checked the site out, his links are on the homepage - the homepage has a pagerank of 0. The other pages on the site do have a pr7 or pr8, but his links are not on these pages.

Is he gaining any benefit by being on this site's homepage even though that particular page of the site has a pr0???
#backlinks #pagerank #question
  • Profile picture of the author Alexa Smith
    Banned
    Originally Posted by cherry_b View Post

    Is he gaining any benefit by being on this site's homepage even though that particular page of the site has a pr0???
    No, he isn't. Well, hardly any.

    It's more commonly the other way round (the homepage is the one with the high page-rank, and the backlinks sold turn out to be on other pages) but it doesn't have to be at all, and he's probably wasted his money, just like most people do, most of the time they "buy links".

    It's possible that if the other, higher-PR pages of that site, and other sites, have decent, relevant links back to that home page, it may gradually acquire some page rank of its own, I suppose.

    Page ranks, and "numbers of backlinks" alone have very little to do with SEO, anyway, these days. One can readily see this from the regularity with which lower-PR pages with fewer backlinks outrank higher-PR pages with more backlinks, on Google's SERP's.

    Much though people selling backlinking services would prefer people not to know it, it turned out (especially after Google's last major algorithm change) that they couldn't hide the truth any longer: rankings are all about quality and relevance. Actually they have been for a long time: there's just a whole industry "out there" trying (with decreasing success) to deny it, because most of them haven't worked out how to make any money by selling services, that way. And it would kill some of those people to dig rather than selling shovels - they don't really know how to, and are better off pretending that their shovels still work. :p

    I wish Google would simply abandon page-ranks altogether, rather than just downgrading their significance all the time while still trying to maintain that they do signify something - when it's increasingly clear to more and more authors, marketers and internet workers that they really don't mean anything worth talking about.
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    • Profile picture of the author LiftMyRank
      I think it's very strange that the homepage is PR0 whilst inner pages are PR7+, that isn't something you see everyday, I would steer clear of advertising from that vendor.
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      • Profile picture of the author cherry_b
        Originally Posted by John Moore View Post

        I think it's very strange that the homepage is PR0 whilst inner pages are PR7+, that isn't something you see everyday, I would steer clear of advertising from that vendor.
        I thought that too. It's a very techie site with xml technology tutorials - so I'm assuming that the tutorials are of very high quality and have a lot of incoming links specifically to them, hence the high pr. But ya, the homepage definitely has a pagerank of 0.

        Even if pagerank has an impact on everything, I'd still like more confirmation that his link being on a page of the site with a pr0 is not worth the $80 he paid four times!!!
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    • Profile picture of the author babyfacedassassin
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      [DELETED]
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      • Profile picture of the author Alexa Smith
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        Originally Posted by babyfacedassassin View Post

        That is interesting backlinks have little to do with SEO.
        Interesting?

        It would be stupid.

        But nobody said that.

        I said that "numbers of backlinks alone" have little to do with ranking. And we can all see that from the way one backlink from a relevant authority site gives you more link-juice than 50,000 non-context-relevant article directory backlinks. As SEO textbook authors have been saying for years. People directly or indirectly selling mass article directory backlinks can deny it until they're blue in the face (and some of them do) but they can't stop it from being true.
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  • Profile picture of the author cherry_b
    That is exactly what I was afraid of....really appreciate the detailed answer

    Now I need to figure out how to break the news to him even though it's going to really f%$! his day up
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    • Profile picture of the author Alexa Smith
      Banned
      Originally Posted by cherry_b View Post

      Now I need to figure out how to break the news to him
      Just dress it up as the uncorroborated opinion of some mouthy chick in a forum.

      There'll be people along to argue with it soon enough, anyway.
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  • Profile picture of the author Aussie_Al
    As usual Alexa is right - I have some sites which are PR 0 or 1 that rank higher than some of my PR4 sites and I make more money off them too. I stopped worrying about the PR of my sites and just focused on what makes me money.
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  • Profile picture of the author ruby2011
    Page Rank still has certain weights in Google ranking algo. In my niche, buying links from irrelevant sites is still a common way to boost keyword rankings. But it is not as important as several years ago.Content is the king after panda updates. So it is more important on creating great content instead of buying links.
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    • Profile picture of the author imMindset
      I wouldn't just rely on Page Rank to determine the value of the incoming links. Run the sites through Open Site Explorer, and check the Page Authority, Domain Authority, mozTrust, and MozRank. These are updated more frequently than PR, much more precise and give you a better idea as to what's going in regards to the quality of links. If the sites really are authoritative, then they should align with these other factors. See if it all add ups.
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