Link Quality - Is it Necessary to Rank Nowadays? - Link Building forum at WebmasterWorld

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Link Quality - Is it Necessary to Rank Nowadays?

Planet13

7:50 pm on Jul 6, 2011 (gmt 0)

System: The following 2 messages were cut out of thread at: http://www.webmasterworld.com/link_development/4335639.htm [webmasterworld.com] by martinibuster - 6:02 pm on Jul 6, 2011 (utc -8)

I'm just throwing this out there to see what others think:

I have seen a few sites rank well and the only quality link they have is a rotating banner ad on a PR 6 authority site. they pay about US $500 per month on those ads. They are dofollow links in those ads.

the rest of their link profile is nothing to write home about - some free directories, some blog comments, some articles, some forum profiles, etc...

Maybe others have opinions on the value of ads like that in passing rank / trust.

martinibuster

2:01 am on Jul 7, 2011 (gmt 0)

They could be redirecting domains for PR and you wouldn't necessarily see it.

Planet13

5:03 am on Jul 7, 2011 (gmt 0)

They could be redirecting domains for PR and you wouldn't necessarily see it.

Hmmm...

Well, I am using open site explorer, which I understand doesn't have the most comprehensive listing of links. But in general wouldn't OSE show 301 redirects?

I guess the other tools don't usually show 301 redirects... Most only show one thousand backlinks, and since they return 973 backlinks from the sites own blog (hosted on blogger), so those tools only show 27 "unique" backlinks.

FranticFish

9:12 am on Jul 7, 2011 (gmt 0)

Last I saw (few weeks ago) OSE does show 301s.

Planet13

5:06 pm on Jul 7, 2011 (gmt 0)

@ FranticFish:

Last I saw (few weeks ago) OSE does show 301s.

Thanks for the confirmation.

I guess the problem might be that while it does show 301 redirects, it might not be as complete (since they use their own crawlers) than as yahoo site exploere or seo spyglass.

martinibuster

5:50 pm on Jul 7, 2011 (gmt 0)

Did you check it with a domain you own? I just ran one of my domains through OSE and it didn't show the backlinks from another domain that redirects to it. It's a domain I picked up years ago to experiment with.

Planet13

7:31 pm on Jul 7, 2011 (gmt 0)

Did you check it with a domain you own?

It does show about 25 redirects from site A to site B. I will have to go through the .htaccess file of Site A to see how complete that is.

Off the top of my head, I would say that is about right, but who knows? I remember doing "a bunch of" redirects from Site A to Site B, but since I am inherently lazy, maybe I just THOUGHT I did a bunch more than I actually did.

Crush

4:45 am on Jul 8, 2011 (gmt 0)

We have a "sleeper site" that is a PR6 that ranks above the mothership site with no links at all. My conclusion is the page rank dial has been cranked up again.

Planet13

5:35 am on Jul 8, 2011 (gmt 0)

We have a "sleeper site" that is a PR6 that ranks above the mothership site with no links at all. My conclusion is the page rank dial has been cranked up again.

Do you mean that the sleeper site (a PR6 site) has no INBOUND links at all? How could it be PR6 if there are no inbound links?

By the way: One site I see at the top of the SERPs only has a Page Rank of 3, while other sites with higher page ranks are found below it in the SERPs.

Now, I know page rank isn't the be all, end all it is made out to be. But this same site, which is based in the US, appears to be ranking at the top of the New Zealand and Australian SERPs as well. I don't think they even ship to those two countries...

CainIV

6:09 am on Jul 8, 2011 (gmt 0)

Link authority in my estimation improves the value of other inbound links in the profile when they are seen by Google as non-paid and relevant.

In other words, the value of some very strong inbound links to the website in my opinion could be improving the weight and strength of other links at the 'unit profile' level. You see this with websites that rank well that have 2-3 great links and 3-500 unique c class ip inbound links that are not spam, and are relevant, but are from articles, blog comments, forums, guest posts etc.

Crush

6:16 am on Jul 8, 2011 (gmt 0)

We bought as a PR6, changed the content, so there are a lot of links to the old index. I am taking about the internals being pr5 and ranking with no other links apart from those stemming from the index page and other internal links.

Crush

6:18 am on Jul 8, 2011 (gmt 0)

@Cain, that is absolutely right.

FranticFish

8:24 am on Jul 8, 2011 (gmt 0)

You see this with websites that rank well that have 2-3 great links and 3-500 unique c class ip inbound links that are not spam, and are relevant, but are from articles, blog comments, forums, guest posts etc

I also see this with sites that have a number of high trust brand links then loads more borderline and dodgy anchor text links. That stuff is rocking the SERPs for high street search terms right now.

martinibuster

9:01 am on Jul 8, 2011 (gmt 0)

@Cain, that is absolutely right.

I've been seeing that across a wide range of niches.

Crush

6:30 am on Jul 9, 2011 (gmt 0)

One thing I would add MB that if the content is thinnish, like more than one source it still works but not as well as something totally unique.

Over the few weeks we have been buying sitewides on blogs, no effect as yet. We might start taking the page rank route soon.

Planet13

6:24 pm on Jul 9, 2011 (gmt 0)

Over the few weeks we have been buying sitewides on blogs, no effect as yet.

Can I ask what the PR on those blog sites was? and was the link something like a "blogroll" type link? Or more like a link in the footer?

I might be seeing the effect of a few "quality" links amplifying the power of lower quality links. I DON'T have a lot of either kind, but the few PR4 / PR5 links I DO have are on topic. My main keyword appears to have jumped from around #24 to around #8

CainIV

3:55 am on Jul 14, 2011 (gmt 0)

Another thing to consider is that the signals are changing. Many of us have been online since before, and through the days of "surgical manipulation" of results with exact text link anchors, etc.

There seem to be increasing sources of signals that I feel Google is using which are "link-less" (this has been discussed in other threads here at WebmasterWorld).

These signals are pulled and analyzed by Google in order to attempt to further recognize and validate a business online.

It seems much akin to the amount and type of ongoing splash a "real" fish makes in the water for lack of a better analogy.

FranticFish

7:39 am on Jul 14, 2011 (gmt 0)

Indeed. How else would you see businesses with no website doing well in Google Places 8 packs?

Citations - these include, but are not limited to, links.

piatkow

12:26 pm on Jul 14, 2011 (gmt 0)

By the way: One site I see at the top of the SERPs only has a Page Rank of 3, while other sites with higher page ranks are found below it in the SERPs.

For any given search arguement PR is only one of many factors. A page which is 100% on topic for a particular arguement should ideally come before higher PR pages that only give the topic a passing mention.

fathom

8:00 pm on Jul 14, 2011 (gmt 0)

1. You can hide links from link checkers... disallowing the crawler associated with the link checker stops you from seeing what they don't want you to see.

2. Google shows samples of links publicly and "doesn't necessarily just show the ones to write home about" so you can never be sure how their profile looks.

3. Deep linking links don't normally show up for default domain queries... If link juice is powering in from sub-pages you clearly are missing the boat on why they rank.

4. Given these the banner ad provides great cover for those that don't really dig for answers.

zehrila

3:57 pm on Jul 15, 2011 (gmt 0)

Page relevance, Domain authority and location of link can play subsequent role. Sitewide links in footer or left/right navigation are pretty much useless.