Inbound Link Diversity and Google
 

I had a thought. Sometimes people seem pretty picky about only seeing their links up among higher PR sites. Sometimes ignoring links from sites with lower PR. But wouldn't this be a way to detect possible spam? You would think that naturally a site with a truly high popularity would be linked to from a wide variety of urls at various PR levels.

Example:

50 PR6
100 PR5
500 PR4
1000 PR3
5000 PR2
7000 PR1
10000 PR0

This would seem natural as opposed to:

5,000 PR6
10,000 PR5
500 PR4
500 PR3
120 PR2
20 PR1
30 PR0

The second would seem an abnormality and point to manipulation. Would anyone venture to say that something like this is taken into account within the actual algorithm being used?
Any implications? The one I would suggest is that a more hands off approach (allowing for diversity) is probably safer for established sites.

It may be more natural, but from a practicality standpoint it's a whole lot easier to just get 1 PR7 link to make you a PR6 as opposed to thousands of PR1-5's. And if that PR6 you earn is weighted less than an opposing PR6 done with the thousands of small links that's fine because it's still higher than the PR5's your competitors have.

While Google attempts to call itself a "natural linking" ranking engine, in reality they have screwed with the concept so much that it is no longer true.

It is in fact very easy to reproduce "natural" links if you have a big enough collection of domains and subject matter all by yourself. So Google attempts to punish or filter out different situations.

Now Google only really reflects natural linking patterns for it's highest ranked sites (like CNN, Microsoft, and a few others). As soon as you get down to PR7 or 8, things start to get fudged. Basically, Google has their thumb on the scale (and that is why adult sites, although some of the most visited sites on the net, don't get good PR rankings!).

Right now, some of my best ranked sites have fairly un-natural but not forced linking patterns in them. As MikeC said, it is easier to get one PR5 or 6 site to link to you than it is to try to get thousands of PR1 or 2 sites to link up.

THE MOST IMPORTANT THING: PR does not translate into good SERP listings... you can take your PR and $5 and get a McBurger... SERPs pay the bills!

Alex

all specualation but it would be my guess that google is penalizing for redundancy of link text rather that the pr of the site that links you

DavidM,
To answer your initial question, I now think that the more diversified you are with ANYTHING, be it inbound links, anchor texts, or even things like the stock market or your other investments, the better off you will be.

So if you are trying to just be more "stable" , then perhaps getting even some low PR inbound links as opposed to just high ones could be more stable.

Then again, with search engines, there is no such thing as 100% stability. Good luck ;)