Footer links? Good odds they won't pass any PR at all.

you raise alot of issues. i'll just list some tips based on my experience:

1) toolbar pagerank is often in accurate for websites that sell links.

2) google places different value on links embedded in content vs top nav links vs footer links. footer links are generally worth less than most other links.

3) a link is worth as much money as it can increase your profits. for example if you are selling dirt & you get a relevant pr8 link, that is not going to be as valuable if you are selling diamonds and getting a relevant pr7 link. you just cant make the same profit on dirt as you can selling diamonds.

4) if you do link buys then try to randomize as much as possible. randomize the anchor text, page placement and urls.

5) the best link buys i have ever done are the ones that generate referral traffic.

google is not stupid and they have years of experience dealing with this type of manipulation. be careful and dont make it too obvious and you can do very well with link buys & exchanges.

This scenario is flawed because there is nothing there about factors that affect the amount of PR that may flow, if any. GoodROI mentions two important factors, the placement of the link and the fact that sites selling links may be penalized and not pass PR at all. But those are just two of many more factors impacting this calculation which in my opinion will not result in an accurate result. Furthermore, even if you could pin down a number that number would not be useful for determining the worth of the link because there are other factors that determine the worth of a link.

Re "outbound internal" links on a page, as well as general outbound links, we know that not all links will pass the same amount of pagerank. What we don't know is exactly the amounts of PageRank that flows out. For instnace, 20 links does not necessarily mean that each link flows out 1/20th of the PR of the page. Some links may be flowing less. Indeed, the amount of PR flowing is likely dampened, across the board so it could be even less.

Then you must take into consideration that the PR displayed on the toolbar may not represent the real PR. But to really screw up all hope of determining how much PR is circulating you have to consider the relevance of the verticals of the backlinks of the sites linking to the site you are considering.

This is all to say that basing a link purchase decision on the amount of PR that may circulate from a site is not possible and in my opinion is the not the correct way to judge the worth of a link. There are many more factors.

GoodROI mentioned traffic. Traffic is a symptom of a healthy site that is doing something right. If you must use a metric one metric that is more important than dividing the amount of links on the page is to visit a site like QuantCast.com or Google Trends for Websites and see what their traffic estimates are. In my opinion, the true worth of a site is measured in traffic. Good traffic is a symptom of a site that is favored by Google.

Look up Matt Cutts and "footer links" on youtube. Sitewide + footer = greatly reduced in value at best.

Sitewide + footer = greatly reduced in value at best.

Just want to give a little more background into the underlying reasons that result in the above described outcome of reduced value.

Regarding sitewides, it's Google's way of balancing out those links so they do not send out an inordinate amount of influence relative to how important the citation is. A sitewide blog roll link is not more important than the content found on every page of the site, particularly a link citation in the context of an article. So Google is trying to balance out the value of that blogroll citation so that it is more in line with Google's goal of crediting a link with the appropriate amount of importance.

Regarding footer links, that's a depreciation of the link due to it's location (bottom of the page) inferring lesser importance.

Put it all together and you get what Sgt_Kickaxe wisely stated.

Hi,

thanks for your useful replies and comments.

3) a link is worth as much money as it can increase your profits.

That's clear. I was asking how much is such a link from a PR6 page(and 1500 of its sub-pages) usually worth in the link selling world.

4) if you do link buys then try to randomize as much as possible. randomize the anchor text, page placement and urls.

Should these link elements on a particular URL be randomly "calculated" on each visit(so they'll change) or just once at the beginning and then remain unchanged?

Look up Matt Cutts and "footer links" on youtube. Sitewide + footer = greatly reduced in value at best.

Thanks, for pointing me to this video, but I heard Matt Cutts saying something different in it: "We do reserve a right to treat links in footer *a little bit* differently".
[youtube.com...]

5) the best link buys i have ever done are the ones that generate referral traffic.

Great Advice!

Maybe you can get better ROI by setting up an affiliate program and soliciting lots of affiliates from high traffic sites, instead of buying a link from a single high PR site.

Also, I think if you were just trying to get an idea of how much you should pay for a link, you might want to repost your question in the link development forum. You might find some people with more experience buying and selling links in that forum.

I hope this helps.

Jkjk, you are missing the point. Matt Cutts said they are distributing the PR differently depending on it's circumstance, as I explained to you above. What Matt Cutts clearly says is, "If something is in the footer, it might not carry the same editorial weight."

That means it will get LESS PR.

What Matt Cutts clearly says is, "If something is in the footer, it might not carry the same editorial weight."

That means it will get LESS PR.

That's not what he said! He said it MIGHT not carry the same editorial weight. In the comment you highlighted from him it gave no concrete answers on footer links and PR.

I think more is being inferred from the word might than was intended. I don't believe an entire sentence can be quoted from the video to support what is being inferred from the single word, might, much less a paragraph's worth. The point of the video is to confirm that this kind of thing happens, and it will take more than the single word might to change the meaning of that video.

"We do reserve the right to treat links in footers a little bit differently. For example, if something is in the footer it might not carry the same editorial weight."

He then goes on to explain using the same reasons I gave several posts up, about how not all links are the same, there are different editorial reasons for them and Google has to determine the reason through the context. There are many, many reasons for depreciating the weight of a link.

The topic of this discussion is PageRank circulation. I listed reasons above why not all links are the same. It's called Link Analysis. This has been around for years and years. It's not new. I was in the room when Marissa Mayer was presenting at SES San Jose in 2003, in a session about bots when she let it out of the bag that links are weighted differently. Google has been depreciating links for at least eight years now. This concept is not new.

Bill Slawski wrote a nice tutorial [seobythesea.com] discussing how Google has a patent on a system that understands that not every link on a page has the same editorial value.

I wasnt arguing the overall subject of the thread about certain links being devalued, as you said it's not new and I think most people know this - I just wanted to state that the comment you highlighted wasn't definitive on the subject.

based on my experience paid links in the footer do pass less pr. im sure there are exceptions but for me paid links in the footer are rarely the best idea.

The footer links will benefit less than the other in links and outbound links.

+1 to goodroi and martinibuster's first comments.

Just to throw another element into this discussion wouldn't it be better in the orignal scenario to have a link on the hompeage of the PR6 site rather than on all the other pages?

On a basic theoretical level I would imagine that unless you were looking at 10,000+ pages the actual PR passed from them wouldn't outweigh any reduction in PR from random surfer modelling (which meant that 15% of PR was lost on each link).

On a practical note you might want to think about other metrics beyond Page Rank. I think this video is a good place to start [seomoz.org ]