Page Ranks And Your Thoughts About Them...
 

Hey guys.

For quite a while, I've seen countless individuals doing PR trades and linking any site out there for a simple "PR Boost". The result is a bunch of sites with no traffic linking to other sites with no traffic, and generally these links are at the bottom of a site and they'll never get any exposure. Sure the PR increases, but is google or any other SE really sending truckloads of traffic? What does PR mean to you, and do you really (personally) see a huge traffic influx when you climb higher?

My guess is that this practice won't be successful much longer, if it's even successful at all. I've done this ONCE and I can honestly say that it never did any more for my PR other than dropping it. The most beneficial thing for me has always been to trade hard links with other sites that I respect and that can send an equal amount of traffic back (or more, and sometimes even less). Overall this seems to be the best for me, and it's brought my PR up to a decent level (PR5's +).

What are your REAL thoughts and experiences with PR trading? Has PR trading worked for you? What do you really get out of it personally? When will people get back to linking sites that they like?!

Considering that as far as I can tell the whole page rank thing started off as nothing more then a gimmick to try to get Windows IE users to install the toolbar before Google was popular I don't see where it has any real use.

Just my 2¢

I've never traded for PR. I do hard links with friends on my established sites and take chances with hard link trades on new sites with other new sites.

I have seen some nice results trading for PR as far as getting traffic from google for my keywords a few months down the road.

I have also seen no results from some of the trades - LOL

But all in all, I think it's worth it :)

PR is just one of the factors that effect how your site ranks in google. There are quite a few others.

A good analogy is the college football BCS rankings, if you followed that CF faisco. Your rank is effected by who you played/beat/loss to (link to), but their rank is effected by who they played/beat/loss to (link to) and on, and on, and on.

A high PR simple means that google:

1. Knows about and has indexed the site.
2. Knows about and has indexed a lot of other sites that link to the site.

Traffic trading and PR trading don't have to be mutually exclusive. There's no reason you can't do both.

On a scale, how many links between traffic trading links and PR links are spidered by SE's? If you have a linklist with 200+ active links, plus hard links, plus PR trade links on the bottom, how useful do you think PR links actually are?

I'm in no means doubting anybody's linking practices. I'm just trying to get a grasp on this while seeing how everybody feels about this topic. In my opinion, this recent outburst in PR trades is a little excessive, while people who are doing the trading arens SEO'ing their sites.

There's a theory that google only spiders so many links on a page, like the first 100 or so. I don't know if that's the number, or even if it's true at all. Some say it's a text thing, like the first x number of characters. I really don't have a clue.

There's a lot of back and forth about whether a non-recip trade is better than a recip trade. Actually, there's a lot of back and forth about everything you can imagine. When all's said and done, you can't get hurt getting good quality sites to link to you, and you can't get hurt linking to good quality sites.

Google doesn't index more than the first 101k of a html page.

Be careful of the words you use - indexing and caching are two completely different things - remember as well that the 101k shown as the max in the SERPs is because that is the limit they have set for storing the cached copy - and does not include graphics - as far as indexing(I assume you mean spidering) I have never seen hard proof that there is a limit - and for that matter I have seen plenty of exceptions

Well, I exchanged backlinks on a site (PR4) that was bigger than 101k, and my backlinks were after the first 101k and they did not show up when I checked which sites link back to me. And I saw this happen with several sites that I linked to..

well i just paid the bill on my godady domains site it is just a template i made a year ago it came back up 20 minutes ago pr6 and even the internal pages but 1 are a pr6 either google really is broke or i am going insane i give up trying to figure out google anymore this site does not have 1 back link just links going off of it and it is a shit site with little or no relevance to anything. but to thoose that i did trade to from if when it hit pr5 it is good news, since it had dropped way down now it is a pr6 and the big update is cumming so hopfully we will all benifit:)

babymaker,

If it's the site in your profile- it's showing as a 3 for me.

no its my domains site not sure whats in my profile lol i forget.

domains site pr6


i had it checked at ans all showed a pr6 too. take a look horrible template site dont know why a pr6.

It's not PR6

DD

really i checked like 10 times and had about ten people at ANS check too, what does it show for you???


http://www.adultxxxdomains.com


copy that in and double check for me if u have a sec?? thanx

i was surprised myself but i did have it checked all over the world and checked here ten times. i know it doesnt deserve it but thats what i am seeing let me know if u have a sec thanx.|santa|

It is showing a PR6 and its because of all of the cafepress backlinks from the stores - 190 or so of them - and other "unusual" backlinks - Google is showing what they found

Of course if you look at any of the backlinks they dont have a link to you unless they were pulled recently so its one of those Google data errors :)

I saw 197 backlinks, but I couldn't find a link to that page on any of the ones I checked. Maybe the had links on them recently and were pulled for whatever reason, and google hasn't found out about it yet or hasn't updated their backlink database, assuming they have such a thing.

Ive noticed that Google is having that problem alot lately - also noticed most of their datacenters are down which leads me to believe they are testing something :) Ive seen some new SERPs floating in and out in the last day or so - but looked like the algo was being worked on

its definatley an error but in my favor for once lol, ps how do u check for backlinks in google???

If you don't have the toolbar...

At google:

link:www.domain.com

link:domain.com

DOH! lol boy am i a fucking idiot lol...never checked that blue i button on my google toolbar lol. thanx for the info was always wondering where people were getting all the backlinks info. and thoose lnks to my domains site i have no idea where thoose came from definatley an error|rasta| one of them is a resturaunt from the town i grew up in lol that one was a lil spooky. should google be updating pr this week?? i am hopng i can transfer a little at least to my other sites b4 this drops like a rock. :)

Your best bet is to check here:

http://www.webmasterworld.com/forum3/

I found Linkster on that board and he tipped me off to this board.

:D

It may look like a PR6 and smell like a PR6... but it aint!

...and its not an error.

DD

so what does that mean if its not an error will it stay pr6 and why if its not an error is google showing 197 backlinks that dont exist??? i had the same thing on ths site b4 it went to a pr5 for 3 months but then dropped to a 2 i think.

Been thinking about the original question - it kinda brings up a misconception that alot of people have and have been basing trades on - that page rank and toolbar PR are one and the same - they are not in my opinion. Page rank is the overall basis of the algorithm used by Google to determine importance of a page based on hundreds of factors (like text, link backs etc.) and determines the results in the SERPs for particular searches. Toolbar PR is just a logarithmic display of the pages standing compared to all pages on the web and is distributed down starting with googles index page (the top of the heap). The "toolbar PR" is just one factor in the actual Page Ranking in the results - and determines a few other thing such as spidering frequency etc.
Unfortunately most trades that are performed use the toolbar PR as the basis instead of what DDave was referring to above which is the "real" PR of a page and has lead to the "PR whore" designation of some that look no further than the toolbar.

Enough spouting - feel free to jump all over this :)

how can u find your real PR is there a tool or a code to add in the search of the site??

Well..... There are reasons your "site" is NOT PR6.... but I was waiting for one of our many Google gurus and "SEO's" to tell you why.......

hmmmmm..

DD

got whacked today anyway lol that crappy site it back to its rightfull pr2 lol. oh well.

Here's the way I see it.

First, the PR calculation gets fubar sometimes, so you'll see sites with a PR6 and have no idea why. Eventually it all gets sorted out though.

Second, when you see a PR6, that's just a graphical representation of PR6.42376539763 or maybe a 5.8425965824 or something like that. I don't know how they round the numbers off, but they do. Two sites that are showing PR6 don't really have the same page rank.

Third PR (as seen in the toolbar) is only one of many factors that determines where your page places (how your page "ranks") for a given search. I think this may be what Linkster was getting at.

Just my theory :)

Just did a little check on someone that I know is backlinking to me at the bottom of a page - Im the 304th link on the page, and it's definitely showing in my new backlinks - the page itself is 82k :)

That's good info to have, Linkster. I looked at a few a while back, and saw that my links at the bottom of longer pages were not showing in the backlinks, but it was very unscientific so I didn't draw any conclusions from it. Just a hmmmm.....

I know for sure that the backlinks google shows aren't accurate, and could even be something they sit around and laugh at when SEO's start making a big fuss over 'em.

Kinda supports my theory of "just do quality link trades and don't drive yourself nuts with the details."

PR doesn't work like it used to, and so I am confused as to what is going on (nothing new).

I have a site which was linked to by a PR5 and a PR4 and I expected to get a PR4 or PR3 from this.

It only made PR2, which I thought was lower than the old days.... but hey!

So I decided that because the target keyword was too hard to manage with a PR2, I would not bother to waste a link from the PR5 on it and wind the site down, as the idea for the site was not too profitable anyway.

So I pull the PR5 link and then about 2 months later, the site still has PR2, but has managed to get into the top 20 for the keyword I wanted, and has one PR4 backward link.

ive seen an increase in se traffic overall since my site went from pr2 to pr4, maybe coincidence.. don't know.