Online Marketing Today

Link Building Misconception 3: Having a Website With High Valued PR Pages Will Improve Your Search Engine Rankings…

If you’re reading this and don’t know what Google Page Rank (PR) is, you’ll find plenty of information about it online so I’m not going to go into a big explanation about it here.

Back in the day having a high PR valued website (home page and internal pages) may very well have had a positive impact on search engine rankings but not for the reason you might think (the fact of having high Page Rank in itself).

I’ll explain what I mean by that in more detail shortly.

However today PR holds very little significance to the point where I don’t pay much attention to it at all. A link is a link as far as I’m (and you should be) concerned.

Ultimately high PR valued websites were a nice metric for webmasters to use to sell text link advertising as they were perceived to have more SEO value than alternative websites with lower values.

However the truth is that just because one website (or more specifically a relevant page within a website) has a better PR value than the next equivalently relevant page on another website, it does not mean the one with the better PR is going to rank higher.

This is best highlighted by doing a search in Google for the term “.com” (or any top level domain extension). Then compare the PR values of the top 10, 20, or 30 websites.

If this myth were true you would expect to see that the resulting websites rank in descending order from highest PR to lowest. However, you’ll quickly see this is not the case.

Feel free to use this tool to check yourself and play around with other keyword phrases in your niche market.

You’ll notice the first result will have a PR of 10. The next might have a PR of 6. The next a PR of 8 and so forth. The evidence against this myth doesn’t get any clearer than that.

So where does this misconception come from?

This largely comes from the misunderstanding about Page Rank in general.

The truth is if you obtain a lot of high PR valued incoming links then your own website will probably will see a positive improvement in rankings. However this is not a direct result of the high PR value of the pages those links are placed on (as highlighted above).

Rather, it’s because of the “authority” and theme relevancy of those pages, and the overall “authority” of the entire website/s as “themed” entities.

Generally if you want your own PR to increase then you want to get as many incoming links as possible, from as many other unique websites as possible, with the highest PR values as possible.

That also means that the websites with high PR values already have a massive amount of incoming links themselves and are seen as authorities (on whatever their subject is related to) in the eyes of Google.

As a result, if your website is about “dog training” and you obtain a link from a high PR valued website that’s also related to dog training, then you’re going to see a positive improvement because of the “theme relevancy of that link”, and the authority of the website, not the specific PR value of the page.

The biggest impact that high PR valued incoming links have is increased spider activity, and the crawling and indexing of your own website. This is because Google will crawl these “authority” websites very frequently (several times daily) and as a result it’s going to “come across” a link to your own website more often and also crawl that more often.

This same effect can be achieved by having many (hundreds or thousands) of incoming links to your website from lesser valued websites.

Whilst the individual pages that these links are on won’t get crawled as often – the share volume you have ensures that Google is going to “come across” and rediscover your website pretty frequently as it crawls the internet in its day to day updates.

Because we can get the same effect from the later (which is a normal progression of laying down a solid link building campaign anyway), focusing on high PR valued incoming links just for the sake of them having high PR values is a bit of an overkill.

It’s really only good tactic (or used to be) if you want to get a website crawled and indexed quicker than normal – however indexing happens pretty fast these days so it hardly seems worth the focus.

SIDE NOTE: All things being equal I would much prefer to obtain (by any means necessary) a text link from the most relevantly themed website / page related to the keyword phrase I’m trying to rank for. You’ll understand what I mean by this more clearly when you read the next myth buster – but if we’re talking about trying to increase PR for the sake of it – to the determinant of measurable improvements in rankings – well, that just doesn’t make sense to me.

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