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Hi!


Can someone tell me whether I should have links or link to sites with high PR only? Every day I see a lot of high traffic / quality sites without any PR. Does Google see PR as the only factor in determining quality?


Thanks in advance for your help guys.
#high #links
  • Profile picture of the author retsek
    I would like to see these quality sites you're talking about with no PR. The top 1000 websites all have PR.

    Regarding your question, no you shouldn't concentrate on PR alone. Focus on relevancy, variety and authority instead. Why worry about PR, dofollow, nofollow etc ...when it now has little to do with ranking.

    A mixture of 100 dofollow/nofollow links from 100 different sites CLOSELY RELATED to yours is as good as 1000s of unrelated ones ..most of which are automatically counted as 0 by google anyway.
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    • Profile picture of the author Brendan Mace
      Originally Posted by retsek View Post

      I would like to see these quality sites you're talking about with no PR. The top 1000 websites all have PR.

      Regarding your question, no you shouldn't concentrate on PR alone. Focus on relevancy, variety and authority instead. Why worry about PR, dofollow, nofollow etc ...when it now has little to do with ranking.

      A mixture of 100 dofollow/nofollow links from 100 different sites CLOSELY RELATED to yours is as good as 1000s of unrelated ones ..most of which are automatically counted as 0 by google anyway.
      Relevancy has no implications on ranking whatsoever. It is not possible for an algorithm to accurately determine the relevancy of a backlink. For example, the New York Times might have an article on baby boomer retirement. The topic "baby boomers" has absolutely nothing to do with major news. But that does not mean a backlink from NY times is not valuable.

      Google cannot police the relevancy of a backlink. Although you will get more traffic from relevant sources, a link is a link.
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      • Profile picture of the author vakantieman
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        • Profile picture of the author Brendan Mace
          Originally Posted by vakantieman View Post

          To OP: This posts just shows that you should not listen to most people on this forum as they can give very very bad advice. Google knows very well whats relevant and whats not and you can't fool them with a quick made blog or single article. Lately I picked up an old blog of mine, I did some spammy backlinking, nothing happened, I did some more, again nothing happened, in fact I was just spamming this blog with 1000's of scrapebox comments. I quit for a month or so, then I started to make some manual comments on very relevant blogs, comments that needed to be autoapproved, few days later I climbed up 3 spots in the rankings on page1, now I am at position 4 for the keyword.

          If relevancy didn't count then all these spammy links would have ranked me higher and everyone knows spammy links is dead. But whats the difference really between a manual spam comment or an automatic spam comment? There is no difference, the only difference was the relevancy of the blog.

          End conclusion of whats key to rank high:

          - links on pages with high PR and few outbound links
          - links on very relevant pages no matter what PR (though higher is always better obvious)

          Some other proof that relevancy counts, there are a few guys running Adsense flippers, they own 800 microniche websites and follow a very simple linkbuilding plan that go's like this:

          - 5 BuildMyRank Posts
          - 10 Relevant blog comments
          - 25-40 Articles posted on articlsites
          - Few dozen bookmarks purely to get indexed

          Since the BMR posts drop off to innerpages this rankvalue won't last very long so whats taking care that the sites rank good and STAY high for a long time? The relevant blogcomments!


          It's kind of amazing that people still think Google is stupid.
          This post gave me a real good laugh. It's ironic that you say not to listen to what everyone says on the forum. Any REAL SEO expert worth his grain of salt knows that google CANNOT detect relevancy.

          It's laughable that you would criticize my post with complete ignorance.

          Yes, you can be penalized for spammy links. But you CANNOT be penalized for irrelevant links <--- because google cannot determine relevancy.

          If you blast thousands of forum profiles at your money site. Or you use senuke x to create thousands of low quality n/a links from the same sources. Google can tell that you are probably manufacturing the "viral popularity" pointing to your site.

          If you get HIGH QUALITY links, then it doesn't matter where the #%#% they are coming from. Google is a robot not a human. If an authority site tells google your website is relevant. It cannot question it.

          Nobody's saying that google is stupid. It doesn't even have a brain. It follows a complex set of rules based on a LARGE NUMBER of metrics. But backlink relevancy is not one of them.

          I normally don't care when people are completely oblivious to the actual facts. But posting false information on a forum with thousands of members is very dangerous to say the least.

          Anybody who's done any testing whatsoever on backlink relevancy can PROVE that it has no bearing at all.
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          • Profile picture of the author jackkarter
            Originally Posted by Brendan Mace View Post

            This post gave me a real good laugh. It's ironic that you say not to listen to what everyone says on the forum. Any REAL SEO expert worth his grain of salt knows that google CANNOT detect relevancy.

            It's laughable that you would criticize my post with complete ignorance.

            Yes, you can be penalized for spammy links. But you CANNOT be penalized for irrelevant links <--- because google cannot determine relevancy.

            If you blast thousands of forum profiles at your money site. Or you use senuke x to create thousands of low quality n/a links from the same sources. Google can tell that you are probably manufacturing the "viral popularity" pointing to your site.

            If you get HIGH QUALITY links, then it doesn't matter where the #%#% they are coming from. Google is a robot not a human. If an authority site tells google your website is relevant. It cannot question it.

            Nobody's saying that google is stupid. It doesn't even have a brain. It follows a complex set of rules based on a LARGE NUMBER of metrics. But backlink relevancy is not one of them.

            I normally don't care when people are completely oblivious to the actual facts. But posting false information on a forum with thousands of members is very dangerous to say the least.

            Anybody who's done any testing whatsoever on backlink relevancy can PROVE that it has no bearing at all.
            Of course Google knows if a site is relevant. Using semantic indexing, Google's algorithm's knows exactly what a site is about. Linking from a fashion blog if you sell shoes is way better than linking from a video game site. Of course if the PR of the games site is 7 and you have the only link it's going to be better than a fashion site with a 0 PR but believe me, Google knows the difference.
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    • Profile picture of the author RosieCain
      Originally Posted by retsek View Post

      Why worry about PR, dofollow, nofollow etc ...when it now has little to do with ranking.
      PageRank is still important as far as it goes. The value of it is diminished if your on-page optimization is poor.
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  • Profile picture of the author Brendan Mace
    And yes, a high PR link is very valuable indeed. But diversity is also very important. If you only have high PR links, it will look very unnatural to google. Typical of a webmaster that would buy links. Instead, you should try to gather a wide portfolio of backlinks of varying authority.
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    • Profile picture of the author RosieCain
      Originally Posted by co2 View Post

      And yes, a high PR link is very valuable indeed. But diversity is also very important. If you only have high PR links, it will look very unnatural to google. Typical of a webmaster that would buy links. Instead, you should try to gather a wide portfolio of backlinks of varying authority.
      I agree with you. Always start with low or N/A PR links, this is what I understand as being natural links coming in for a new site. When google dance is over for a period time, then start high PR links.
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  • Profile picture of the author eaglesflamenco
    of course not man, plz just ignore PR,it does not make sense,there are more factors that u should pay attention to,instead of just PR
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  • Profile picture of the author Brendan Mace
    I feel like there's so much to criticize about your post that I could spend an hour breaking it apart.

    first of all... "everyone knows that spammy links are dead"

    ... tell that to people that are making fortunes off the backs of scrapebox, zrumer and senukex.

    Blasting low quality links to your money site is just stupid. And the fact that you recently blasted one of your own blogs with scrapebox proves that you really do not have any idea about what you're doing.

    If you're going to link spam, then you need to have a struture that leaves no footprint to google. Which is very hard to do. And not recommended for an seo newbee.

    That's why it would be wiser for him to pursue higher quality links. But not because low quality links can't still be effective.

    ===============================

    And the BUILDMYRANK example....

    how are buildmyrank posts more relevant?

    They may be more authoritative and higher quality links. But they can be just as irrelevant as a scrapebox blog comment.

    I think that you're confusing "relevancy" with "quality"
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  • Profile picture of the author Brendan Mace
    "If relevancy didn't count then all these spammy links would have ranked me higher and everyone knows spammy links is dead. But whats the difference really between a manual spam comment or an automatic spam comment? There is no difference, the only difference was the relevancy of the blog."

    There are a couple differences...

    1 - scrapebox is used to blast THOUSANDS of comments at the same time. Not just one. You're basically telling google that this CANNOT be a natural occurence.

    2. Scrapebox tends to work on unregulated blogs that already are known for being link farms. Low quality blogs = low quality signals.

    NOTHING TO DO WITH RELEVANCY WHATSOEVER.

    The argument that scrapebox blasts provide irrelevant backlinks to your site and scrapebox blasts are bad for your site does not logically prove that irrelevancy is the reason for the penalty. The reason for the penalty is because it is OBVIOUSLY not natural.
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  • Profile picture of the author Brendan Mace
    "Some other proof that relevancy counts, there are a few guys running Adsense flippers, they own 800 microniche websites and follow a very simple linkbuilding plan that go's like this:

    - 5 BuildMyRank Posts
    - 10 Relevant blog comments
    - 25-40 Articles posted on articlsites
    - Few dozen bookmarks purely to get indexed"

    I feel like I need to reiterate ONE MORE TIME....

    This quote starts off by saying the following proves that relevancy matters. And then does not provide an example that has anything to do with relevancy.

    Blogs on BMR can be just as irrelevant as any other blog source.

    Can you please explain how google knows that the keyword "Tim Tebow" is related to "football"

    There are literally millions of possible keywords that exist. And new ones are invented every single day. No robot can accurately determine the relevancy of every keyword that exists. Which is why google CANNOT include relevancy in their algorithm.
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  • Profile picture of the author Juvv2096
    I say quality over quantity. Article submissions are good, social bookmarking as well would be a good start. Diversify your link types and you will have good results. Dont just do one thing liek article submissions or forum profiles. Spread your link styles around, and mix it up. This way you will have way more diversity which will be a huge benefit.
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  • Profile picture of the author Avy Smith
    They can be Spam links but they can also be links from the social bookmarking sites. The PR makes us special at search engines but now as you can see there are million of users available on social networks and social bookmarking sites the traffic flow could be from anyone. But striving to get a high PR is the first thing to be satisfied with.

    Avy
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  • Profile picture of the author Lucas Becker
    My best tip I can give you - stop worrying about where your links come from, what PR they are and what sources/platforms you use to build them. Just do it.

    I personally don't care whether it's a low-PR or a high-PR link, I take them all (of course, if I have a choice then I'll go with the higher-PR ones, but I don't hesitate to build as many links, regardless of the PR, do-follow/no-follow, etc.)
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  • My advice would be to get backlinks from wherever you can. You want it to look natural to Google, so this means high PR links, low PR links, no follow links, do follow links etc. etc.

    Don't overthink the backlink thing. Just get them wherever you can.
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  • Profile picture of the author webguru11
    Thanks to all of you for your help.
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  • Profile picture of the author jalicia18
    do-follow and high outbound links for your backlinks.
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  • High PR backlinks are priceless when it comes to improving your overall rankings, of course you can never negate the importance also of decent relative material on your site mainly because good content prompts respectable sites to link with your site even of its new, hence your connection to these high ranking, reputable sites brings respect in the eyes of Mr Google.
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  • Profile picture of the author canadaimmigration
    Originally Posted by webguru11 View Post

    Hi!

    Can someone tell me whether I should have links or link to sites with high PR only? Every day I see a lot of high traffic / quality sites without any PR. Does Google see PR as the only factor in determining quality?

    Thanks in advance for your help guys.

    Yes, you can get links from high Pr websites but for this your website should also have PR. PR is not the single factor to determine the quality, there are several other factors to determine the quality of a webpage and domain.
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  • Profile picture of the author bermuda
    It would be great if you manage to get some high PR links which ultimately will result in having your web PR score getting improved but the fact is that higher PR will not always lead to improvements in web ranks. The most important issue when it comes to building links for websites is where they come from and how relevant they are to the niches and commercial fields in which domains are active. Even a zero PR link coming from a relevant blog would be very useful.

    There is no doubt that today, PageRank is still considered to be an important factor examined by Google to give ranks to the websites but while searching the net, you can find lots of low PR sites which outperform their high PR competitors. What is the reason in such cases? The idea is the sites have managed to gain some one-way links, powered by the primary anchors and they come from spots which are highly relevant to their subjects, adding to their web ranks too.
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  • Profile picture of the author rosesmark
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    • Profile picture of the author mosthost
      Originally Posted by rosesmark View Post

      How i know about blog that blog belong to Do-Follow or No-Do-Follow...Help Me
      Click on view source for the page. Click "find." Look for "nofollow". If you don't see it, you're okay.
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  • Profile picture of the author diyakapoor
    To get high rankings on Google you only need to build theme based PR links. high PR links will help you in getting fast results.
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  • Profile picture of the author kkchoon
    High PR links are great to have, but relatively hard to acquire. If I need a lot of link juice, it will be very hard to fulfill with only high PR sites, that's why I rely heavily on established blog networks for as many links as I can get, although they are not all high PR, but add up can be very powerful!
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    • Profile picture of the author mikest4u
      Well In My Opinion you have To Focus on Relevent Theme Based Inbound Links Instead of High PR Back links! Google always prefers Theme based inbound links!
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      • Profile picture of the author kkchoon
        Originally Posted by mikest4u View Post

        Well In My Opinion you have To Focus on Relevent Theme Based Inbound Links Instead of High PR Back links! Google always prefers Theme based inbound links!
        Actually, Google don't really care about that. However, I found that Google do care about theme based on page structure, that is - your site should have relevant categories and structure in SEO SILO style to receive the best rank...
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  • Profile picture of the author MikelDonel
    Not Only , But High PR Links Improving Your Website.
    You Need To Get Backlinks That Relavent To Your Niche Too.
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  • Profile picture of the author MassiveM
    Please do NOT consider PR as the only metric that matters. There are 15 - 20 metrics that are important when it comes down to it in terms of link building if you want to be strict. PR is so easily manipulated and it's only raw link popularity on a PAGE LEVEL, not DOMAIN LEVEL.

    Back to the question, it's not important, quality matters, not just PR and again, I can tell you now, getting ONLY high PR links can raise a flag against your site with Google, it's just SO unnatural!
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  • Profile picture of the author Chris Sweeney
    Originally Posted by webguru11 View Post

    Hi!


    Can someone tell me whether I should have links or link to sites with high PR only? Every day I see a lot of high traffic / quality sites without any PR. Does Google see PR as the only factor in determining quality?


    Thanks in advance for your help guys.
    Like others have said, high PR links are excellent for improving SERP rankings for any keyword. I would take them over low quality article/directory/profile/bookmark backlinks anyday. Some would argue that high PR links should only be a part of your overall link portfolio, which would include those lower-quality links as well, but I don't buy that, nor would I waste my time with those low quality links anymore. If you look at the link profiles of people who are ranking for some competitive terms, you'll see their link portfolios consist of MOSTLY ALL high PR links, i.e. blogroll and homepage backlinks. For example, check out the IMer who has one of the top spots for "car insurance". All high PR backlinks.
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    • Profile picture of the author samyindia
      Originally Posted by Chris Sweeney View Post

      Like others have said, high PR links are excellent for improving SERP rankings for any keyword. I would take them over low quality article/directory/profile/bookmark backlinks anyday. Some would argue that high PR links should only be a part of your overall link portfolio, which would include those lower-quality links as well, but I don't buy that, nor would I waste my time with those low quality links anymore. If you look at the link profiles of people who are ranking for some competitive terms, you'll see their link portfolios consist of MOSTLY ALL high PR links, i.e. blogroll and homepage backlinks. For example, check out the IMer who has one of the top spots for "car insurance". All high PR backlinks.
      But mate, you can not see ALL backlinks of other people. The Yahoo site explorer is not working any longer and it was the only backlink checker which has showed all backlinks. Because of this, you do not know if those people who you talk about have low quality links or not.

      Link diversity is important. High quality links are needed as well as low quality backlinks. Nobody should rely on high PR links only, or low PR links only. Both is needed. It is looking unnatural to Google if a website only has the best of the best backlinks.
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      • Profile picture of the author Riki Oh
        I will assume that Google CAN detect relevancy because that only makes sense. Regarding high-PR-only vs. mixing it up, I cannot say. Most people will say that the natural-looking approach will be your safest bet for longevity and sustainability.

        If you want high PR links that are also relevant - get scrapebox.
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      • Profile picture of the author Chris Sweeney
        Originally Posted by samyindia View Post

        But mate, you can not see ALL backlinks of other people. The Yahoo site explorer is not working any longer and it was the only backlink checker which has showed all backlinks. Because of this, you do not know if those people who you talk about have low quality links or not.

        Link diversity is important. High quality links are needed as well as low quality backlinks. Nobody should rely on high PR links only, or low PR links only. Both is needed. It is looking unnatural to Google if a website only has the best of the best backlinks.
        Well of course a natural looking link profile looks good to Google IF they are to manually inspect your website and its backlinks. However, just for ranking purposes, high PR links are all one needs. It's the easy, simple, and effective way. No low-quality crap, no link juicing/boosting/indexing necessary.

        As for backlink checking software, check out SEO Spyglass. It pulls backlinks from SEVERAL different sources. Of course no backlink tool is going to show you ALL of the links to a site, and that's not really necessary for a backlink checking tool anyway. I use it to see "about" how many links there are, as well as (more importantly) what types of links they are using to rank (which is normally some sort of high PR blogroll, homepage, blog comment, etc., type link). I then devise a similar linking strategy, and that usually does the trick.
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  • Profile picture of the author Lakbay
    If your goal is to increase your site's Page Rank then building links from high PR sites would be the way to go. However traffic can come from both low to high PR websites. But don't get me wrong i would build links from High PR sites any day.
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  • Profile picture of the author IMdude123
    if you have a PR4 website it doesn't mean you will be higher in the serps than a PE3 website.
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  • Profile picture of the author LifeIsGood
    Thanks, guys.
    I love people who know how to think.

    LifeIsGood ~ It's About To Get Even Better!
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  • Profile picture of the author linkpacts
    Google has been monitoring relevance for a long time and they can definitely spot this. Relevance does not only gain the favor of search engines, it also allows you to attract the traffic you are targeting. For off-site quality, I agree that backlinks should be from high ranking as well relevant websites. Do not risk being penalized.
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  • Profile picture of the author Pyramid Linkers
    You need quality backlinks, but not necessarily high PR backlinks. Alot of quality sites will have PR but don't necessarily have to. Focus on writing good promotional content, adding it to quality sites and getting your links indexed.
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