Page 9 - Link Building 101

Ask for them!

Gary thank you ever so much for that extremely useful article.

I do have two questions however. When you talk about google's weighting on back links and bleed rates, and talk about 50 links, 10 links, 2 links....just to be sure, are these links on one individual page or one site as a whole? The way I'm reading it leans toward one individual page.

Also I understand pages with no PR are meaningless. Is there anyway google will subtract PR from your site if you have very low or unranked PR sites linking to you? You state a page with few outbound links needs a PR of at least 2 to boost your own PR. So if my PR was a 4, and i have a back link from a site with a 1 PR, would my site:
A - get very little positive bleed.
B - negative bleed
C - no change in PR at all.

Thanks again for your great article. It was a real treat!

cheers
marc

Just because some "self proclaimed expert" writes something doesn't make it true...

Gary's stuck on a myth [IMHO] and uses that myth to confuse people [whether intention or not that the resulting end] you got to judge for yourself what is true for you and what are guesses that other make and are not based on any clear facts.

A counterpoint on this "BLEED" question:

PageRank will always depreciate "naturally" [that means it will always drop] as Google includes more pages... the scale is fixed 0.0 to 1.0 and 5 updates ago the top "most important page" had the best PR10 and the least important "the worse PR0" and 50 billion pages share the middle grades... 4 updates the same thing but 70 billion pages shared the middle... 3 updates the same thing but 90 billion pages shared the middle... 2 updates the same thing but 100 billion pages shared the middle... and this update has 140 billion pages sharing the middle... which suggests the difference between each ORDERED PAGERANK pages gets keeps getting smaller and smaller and smaller and some pages gets lot of links and other kinda just accept their "smaller fate"... and drop a PR level or two.

It's quite natural to lose PR... it's more natural than gaining it actually.

In context... [the actual numbers are total BS the illustration is factual though] if you got a PR position of PR5 based on 100 links and each of those averaged out at an equal share of 0.005 to make that PR5...

and Google added 100 billion new pages to the formula... so your average isn't 0.005 per link its .0046... and you added new links but their average on their own increased your overall averager by 0.0002 so you are now 0.0048 your best page is only a PR4 even though you added more links to you domain.

The other negative value in this is "just because you continue to add more links and are aggressive in link development... doesn't mean all those domains that you got links from previously are as agressive as you... your PR is based primarily on the historical "past" value and if that "depreciates faster than you agreessively attract new links - your PR will always drop... regardless of how much new effort you pour into it.

Course gary isn't coming at this from a "lost value" but a "gained value" based on the number of links on any specific page... and how all pages that are linked to "bleed" PR from the original "if there is no path to send it back"...

Short of only links to other pages that don't ever link to any other pages [internally or externally] this "myth" doesn't occur...

People that focus on PageRank bleed or PageRank leak are shortsighted... they don't follow the ebb & flow of PageRank to the "100's of billions" of paths it can take... thus all their calculations [if done at all] are why they can observe this "lost blood".

Ignoring "bleed" is the best advice... I got lots of pages with 500+ links to counter.

Hi Gary

Thank you so much for your insight into back links and SEO

Im just doing research regarding SEO and I hope you can elaborate on the comment below:

"This, put in basic terms, means that spending the time that it takes to obtain a back link from a site that has no PR is meaningless."

Reason being, I used a backlink tool to see who a competitor is linked with. All the backlinks are coming from the same company (obviously a SEO company). The company has a massive directory and basically put my competitor in every category on their site. I checked the PR for this SEO companies website and it is low (0/10). Now when i do a search in google, nothing specif for eg. handmade jewellery, my competitors page comes up in the top 4 organically.

To get to the point, the only links my competitor has is about 300 links with the same SEO company and the SEO companies directory page has a low PR......so how does it rank so highly if it is linked to a low PR site.

Sorry my english is beyond tragic.

TIA

misswee

Hi Misswee,

Ignore Fathom, <snip>

I left SEO Chat <snip>

My email is <snip> if you need advice give me a ring.

Cheers,

Gary

It is very sad to see two of the most knowledgeable SEOs that visit this forum have such a big falling out. The rest of us enjoy the disagreements between you and fathom as we learn from the more indepth discussion of what works and does not work.

Gary please do not stop visiting the forum and sharing your vast wealth of knowledge and experience with us. The forum will be lessened by the loss of your posts.

You are one of the members that inspired me to become activley invloved in this community. Things I have learnt from your posts have helped me win my market.

Please reconsider leaving the forum.

I agree Gary, you would be missed...

Sorry to see you couldn't find any value in answering my posts...

CAVEAT: I'm sure I can find time to visit you at all these public engagements... and get my answers there.

The problem you start with... what's its PageRank 3 months from now, 6 months, 1 year?

Ya know... in Feb 2008 I picked up fldp.org the homepage had a PR5 value... I forgot about the domain until the summer and then added some basic pages to it in August... if you look today it's PR8... Using Gary's ideals here... today's PR is meaningless because it didn't have it back in Feb? Does that make sense?

Don't ever evaluate the wealth of anything base on a PageRank that is automatically obsolete the moment you see it.



Don't assume you know the way of things... connecting the dots A to B to C... and thinking that "that's it" is why Gary doesn't like me much.



Just because those are the only links you see doesn't mean squat.

Hi Fathom

Don't ever evaluate the wealth of anything base on a PageRank that is automatically obsolete the moment you see it.

Thank you, I just wanted that clarified.


Don't assume you know the way of things... connecting the dots A to B to C... and thinking that "that's it" is why Gary doesn't like me much.


I'm a noob to SEO and i know that. I'm here to learn and ask questions.

Just because those are the only links you see doesn't mean squat.[/QUOTE]

Can you elaborate on this please. Do you mean they can have hidden links??

Thank you

misswee

Google only reports a sample of links via the link command... with access to the webmaster console for your own website it will sure you all links it has crawled... unfortunately, you don't get to see that data for competitors and as such you don't see their whole linking picture.