Can someone answer some newb backlink questions please?

I recommend fiverr if your limited on money, just search for 'edu gov backlinks' sort it by rating and find a gig with a good number of orders and positive feedback

Edit: oh and make sure they don't have a lot of orders in queue or they may never get to you

Page ranks have very, very little to do with link-juice, these days. You can see this for yourself from the regularity with which lower-PR pages with fewer backlinks outrank higher-PR pages with more backlinks, in Google's SERP's.

The value of backlinks is about two main things: quality and relevance.

Call me naive, but I'd like to think that "most people on here" are at least a little better informed than that.

The reality is that .edu backlinks aren't worth anything extra just from being on .edu domains, for all the reasons explained here.

That's just one of the many, many reasons why page-ranks are increasingly becoming a futile approach to backlinking. I wish Google would just openly do away with page-ranks altogether, rather than just so consistently making them less and less relevant while perpetuating the myth that they matter in any meaningful ways.

Again, this simply isn't so.

For me, no-follow backlinks are valuable: I make money from them. When I can leave value-adding comments on relevant blogs, I get targeted traffic from them, without even having to do the targeting myself. And that means opt-ins and sales. The time-consuming part of "blog-commenting", for me, is identifying blogs relevant enough to my niche for their traffic and backlinks to be worth anything to me. Once I've found one, I'm certainly not going to fail to make a relevant, value-adding comment on it, if I can, just because its backlinks are allegedly "nofollow". I have the Firefox one-click toy to differentiate between them (the version 6.01 one seems to have installed itself in my Firefox now: it wasn't available when I first downloaded version 6.0) but I don't even check them - simply not relevant to me. Many search engines seem to ignore "NoDoFollow" anyway. Many people believe that Google doesn't discount "nofollow" as much as it sometimes claims: it's ambiguous at best. There are many threads here explaining/discussing do-follow/no-follow links, if you're open to having a little re-think about them: this one might start you off, and then there's more here, here, here, here, here, and so on.

Well, maybe it's possible to help you out by explaining to you that much of what you believe at the moment is actually mistaken.

That's never easy, though, in reality - and particularly not in a forum full of people promoting services which directly or indirectly rest on widespread misunderstandings being perpetuated and propagated. As such threads continue, vested interests sometimes tend to become vociferous and argumentative interests. :rolleyes:

So ... I wish you well, but my own feeling is that you're barking up the wrong tree altogether at the moment; sorry.

Anyway, a careful read through all the threads linked to above may broaden your perceptions a little - I hope so.

All you're assumptions are pretty much spot on. High pr page links are the very best around and if you truly want a good quality link I would be very skeptical about using fiverr. The only way you can guarantee your link sticks is to rent it from a high pr home page network or buy one. (or you could try asking for a link). There are plenty around here or other forums. If you buy .edu links from fiverr or here for that matter they are usually forum or blog comments on .edu.xxx sites and get deleted after a few days anyway. Although after having said that don't underestimate high pr do follow blog comments for a great boost if you can find a reputable seller who does it manually. My advice is take one site with a decent keyword that you think will convert and try a High pr homepage network and see where you are after a month. If your competition isn't that strong you should get on page one with relativly few decent links. Maybe 25 or so. Renting links is expensive but if you clear €100 a month on Amazon and you spend €25 on links you're in a pretty good position. Finally you could try something like BMR. The links don't stick on the homepage but they seem to last long enough to give you a nice serp increase.

@Alexa. There's no doubt that you know way more about this stuff than I do and I've learn't a lot from your posts in the past so I'm not arguing with you. But I think you might be cofusing PR on your own site versus getting a link from a high pr page. I have lots of high pr pages that are outranked by lower pr pages, but this is for numerous reasons. Not specifically targeting that keyword, non original content, on page optimisation etc. However if you were to get a link from my site or the one above me with the lower PR surely the higher pr link would be better. The reason being that google has determined that my page has more authority, hence the higher pr.

I think recently especially after the newest round of updates, quality and relevant backlinks have been given much more importance. Unless you can find a .edu blog or page in your own niche I'd say you'd be better off just finding a site in whatever niche you're targeting.

I also use the Firefox plugin and find it very helpful. It saves a lot of time having to view the source code.

EDU and Gov backlinks are great, however backlinks on high PR relevant blogs to your site are becoming even better for SEO. The search engines are putting alot of weight on "user experience".

If your site is about body building and you have a link on a .gov site about PAC reform it will not be as good as a link on a high PR site about "strength training." Also the amount of time people spend on your site plays a big role in pushing you up the rankings. Which is why having a video on the landing page is a good idea.

Keep working smart, get to the first page and the targeted traffic will come then snowball from there! Good Luck....