Are Incoming Links With High Page Rank The Most Effective?
Link Building Misconception 4: High Valued Google Page Ranked (PR) Links Are The Most Effective Incoming Links To Obtain…
This misconception is very closely related to the previous - ”Having a Website With High Valued PR Pages Will Improve Your Search Engine Rankings”. You can read that here if you missed it.
In that misconception we debunked the idea that there is a direct correlation between high Page Ranked valued pages and the order in which they rank.
The truth of the matter is that pages rank in the search engines because of how relevant they are for the respective keyword phrases in question.
The individual pages themselves hold “theme relevancy”, as does your entire website as an entity (which is why internal pages will often rank better for specific terms than your home page – because they’re seen as more relevant).
This relevancy is obtained by…
- On site or “internal” factors – how well structured that page is for the keyword phrase in question and how well your website passes relevancy to the page via internal linking
- Off site factors – namely incoming links (and the quality of those links) from other third party websites.
Let’s say you want to rank for the term “dog training”.
The most valuable link you can hope to obtain to help pass relevancy for that term to your website/page is from the #1 website / page already ranking for that term.
This is because it’s already seen as the most relevant page online for that term (regardless of its Page Rank value). We can then work backwards in descending order of the search engine results to figure out what our next most valuable links are.
So where does this misconception come from?
Again this largely comes from the misunderstanding about Page Rank in general and the confusion around the previous misconception. The statement…
“High Valued Page Ranked (PR) Links Are The Most Effective Incoming Links To Obtain…”
…would be true, if only it were phrased as…
“The Most Theme Relevant Incoming Links Are The Most Effective Incoming Links To Obtain…”
In terms of link building – getting just 5 of the existing ranked top 30 websites / pages linking back to your own optimized page (and linking back using the target phrase as anchor text) will have a much bigger impact on your rankings than getting 100 random links from other less relevant websites / pages.
Of course, that’s much easier said that done (and often you’ll have to purchase text link advertising to obtain such links – if the option is even available) because most of these websites aren’t in the process of simply handing out links willy nilly via link exchanges or other means.
With that in mind it’s often much easier to get the same impact from those lesser valued links (via strategic directory submissions, blog commenting on theme relevant blog posts, other link building techniques etc.) simply by scaling up on volume.
This is also why a link is a link – every link holds value – and you have to approach a link building campaign using the most available and realistically achievable methods available.
Sure, I’d love to grab as many of those “most theme relevant” incoming links as possible.
If I can’t then I’ll happily achieve the same results by throwing several hundred incoming links from other lesser relevant websites if needs be and using targeted anchor text to pass the necessary relevancy.
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