More links = less page rank?

It became an interesting and repeating observation in recent months.

Site A has PR 7 backlink and 3 backlinks total. Site B has PR7 backlink and 600 backlinks total.

Site A got PR6 while Site B has only PR3.

This almost implies that the pagerank flowing into the site is 'averaged' over all incoming links. Meaning, the larger number of crap links (low PR links, no Pr or PR 0) you have, the smaller your resulting pagerank is as these links devalue any high PR links you might have.

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15 Comments

  1. SherwinJTB sherwinjtb.com
    Apr 1st, 2010

    The idea is the keywords. People search for keywords not page rank. Your links need to be relevant with your keyword descriptions.

  2. Linkbuildr linkbuildr.com
    Dec 28th, 2009

    time for a new link building strategy....ouch. I imagine most of those links are un related and very low quality despite PageRank meaning nothing these days.

  3. Art memoryimprovementcentral.com
    Oct 12th, 2009

    This is exactly what I have been thinking about recently. The first person in charge of my site's SEO submitted 40,000 + backlinks to a PR0 directory, all with completely irrelevant keywords (valioso.biz/economy, when I have a self help site). I believe this is really hurting my rankings and keyword relevancy.

    • Vladimir prelovac.com
      Oct 12th, 2009

      Yep you should aim for low volume high quality links

  4. Scott Hendison seoautomatic.com
    Jul 8th, 2009

    Vladimir - Interesting observation, and I've seen it too, although I think i never actually realized it until reading this. Huh - Would be interesting to see some real tests. Can you try that test with 500 crappy social bookmarking links and let us know? ;)

    @arnold - Yes, that site is right, IMO. Get a US host for your .com if your target is the US - I'd say to always use home country host for any TLD...

  5. Arnold Heleman
    Jul 7th, 2009

    Hi Vladimir ! I really need your help. For one year I have been linking to my site about jazz music and still ranking very low in Google. My web host is in the UK and my target country is the USA. Now this so called seo site http://best-seo-optimization-tips.co.uk/ suddenly tells me that my hosts location should match the location of my target country. Do you know if that is correct ? Thanks in advance !

  6. Andrei (Savings Guru) increase-savings.com
    Jul 6th, 2009

    Hello, Vladimir!
    I see where you are going, but in my opinion there is only correlation, not causation. Christopher has a point there - but not on content, but relevancy. The 600 backlinks are very unlikely to come from contextually relevant pages (same applies for anchors), so they would count as backlinks, but decrease authority (site often mentioned on non-relevant pages = G might think someone is playing with ranking).
    I am no expert myself, but have fun with the mocksite I put in my signature - why does it have PR1 (or at least had it when I wrote this) :-)

  7. Adar explainstuff.com
    Jul 5th, 2009

    PR has nothing to do with content bro.... it has to do with what sites link to yours.

  8. Christopher christopher-roberts.co.uk
    Jul 3rd, 2009

    I don't think so. Its about the content.

  9. Mike Schinkel mikeschinkel.com
    Jun 29th, 2009

    Interesting post but I'm stumbling over the terminology you are using here: "Site A has PR 7 backlink and 3 backlinks total. Site B has PR7 backlink and 600 backlinks total."

    What is a "PR 7 backlink?" (I know what PR is, but not a "PR 7 backlink.") Also, when you say "600 backlinks" do you mean 600 links from other sites pointing to your page?

  10. Charles M nwesource.com
    Jun 29th, 2009

    I need to know the real answer on this one...

    In addition, I am wondering how directly Pagerank relates to SERPS on Google?

  11. Vladimir prelovac.com
    Jun 28th, 2009

    And page rank and search rankings are two different things. A site can have low PR and still rank highly and vice verse.

  12. Adar explainstuff.com
    Jun 28th, 2009

    Vladimir, you know what .....this is the exact same thing I was thinking about after this week's update.

    I had PR3 till then with about 90 backlinks.
    Now I am PR2, with 1400 backlinks. Most of the backlinks I acquired are from new websites, where I made changes to the templates and themes of a bunch of websites and added explainstuff.com to the footer of those sites.
    All of them are 0 PR.

    I guess this assumption can be true.

  13. Vladimir prelovac.com
    Jun 28th, 2009

    It's an observation I made, not a confirmed rule. However if I was to create crappy 500 social bookmarking links I am pretty convinced site A in this example would lose it's PR6.

  14. Tony Lindskog wpviews.com
    Jun 28th, 2009

    I don't know if I can agree with that as it would be too easy to destroy a competitors PR by mass submitting their site to all kinds of low level directories.

    Since you cannot truly control the sites that link to yours; if having the PR average out by the sites linking in, the only way to "protect" yourself from that would be to block the referral site which sounds very counter intuitive. IMHO

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