Comments on: More links = less page rank?

By: Vladimir

Vladimir

Yep you should aim for low volume high quality links

By: Art

Art

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.

By: Scott Hendison

Scott Hendison

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...

By: Arnold Heleman

Arnold Heleman

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 !

By: Andrei (Savings Guru)

Andrei (Savings Guru)

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) :-)

By: Adar

Adar

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

By: Christopher

Christopher

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

By: Mike Schinkel

Mike Schinkel

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?

By: Charles M

Charles M

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

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

By: Vladimir

Vladimir

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

By: Adar

Adar

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.

By: Vladimir

Vladimir

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.

By: Tony Lindskog

Tony Lindskog

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