Article Discussion: Hoarding Doesn't Pay

Not sure if the benefits outweigh the losses if you hoard your PageRank? A PageRank policy that includes linking to other useful sites, and passing along PageRank, could help your own site more than is often realized. Read on to help formulate a PageRank policy that is right for you.


Read the full article here: Hoarding Doesn't Pay

This is quite an interesting article and one has to really stop and think if linking out to themed sites establishes your site as a so called 'hub site'. One of the easiest sites I ever SEO'd (No ranking to #1 in two weeks) had many outgoing links to government themed sites.

When we were called in to SEO the site, we performed the basic on-site optimization and began to perform the standard off-site optimization also. Before the next google PR/IBL update, the site had gone from NO ranking to #1 in its respectible field and keywords. It was truely unbelievable.

Thanks for the article.

Hexed

Hi hexed.

Thanks for enjoying my article.

That's an interesting real life experience regarding the linking out power of hub sites.

I have written an article, that will appear in the near future, on hub sites. Watch for that one, at an SEO Chat near you.

Thanks.

Hi Wayne ... what basis do you have for POSTULATING tht google may PENALIZE someone for using javascript links to avoid passing PR??I assume you have NONE, since i know of many sites that do that for good reason (you do not want to waste pr on an affiliate program link for example) .....

I suggest that you remove that reference in your article since people who do not know better maybe MISLEAD to think there is some validity to that when in fact there is none .....

I never said Google was handing out penalties for using javascript. Nowhere in that section do I even use the words "penalty" or "penalties", although I can see where you might infer that possibility.

I was providing some rumours and speculation, that are fairly widespread in the SEO community, that Google may target PageRank hoarders by actually passing along PageRank to the javascript linked sites.

Whether or not Google will do that is, of course, speculative.

I am certainly not the first or only person to say it.

In my more advanced articles, I try to provide some speculation and rumours, to provide some fuel for thought. I always try to label the speculations as such as well.

My articles would be extremely boring, and have little value, if all I provided were dead certainties; considering there are no sure statements with Google.

This article was intended for more experienced webmasters, as opposed to newcomers to SEO. In the case of some newcomers to SEO, it could be said that any knowledge could be a dangerous thing.

Thanks for reading and for your thought provoking comments.

They are always appreciated.

Wayne,

I get many natural links from .edu sites and a few from state government sites. My question is: What would I gain by linking out to similar sites? In my case I really do not see the value. What do you think?

Ammon Johns came up with the term "Hoarding PageRank" its cool that its becoming popular. Article here and here -> http://www.seroundtable.com/archives/000233.html and at other sites too.

I don't see any reasons that linking to themed good sites will help your ranking, or linking to bad sites will hurt your rankings (what about an extradinary article that criticizes a few bad sites?). The key is relevance here.

IMO it is the LINK TEXT that gets you big credits

What do you mean by this:

(what about an extraordinary article that criticizes a few bad sites?).

Please explain so I can look into it as a potential article.

On a personal note, I am glad that you read, and provide honest critiques of my articles. They are important to help stimulate discussion so we can all learn from one another. As with all SEO topics, there is room for some differing opinions on the subject. :-D

Thanks.

Wayne Hurlbert

my experience is in line with EGOL - "IMO it is the LINK TEXT that gets you big credits".

Wayne, what I meant was an example - a good web page may link to a few bad sites for the purpose of criticizing. The problem is the basic assumption of PageRank - a link from page A to page B is a vote from page A for page B. It could be other way around. real meanings of linkings on the web are much more complex than the assumption of original PageRank algorithm. I'm suer Google has drastically enhanced or changed the algorithm, but they won't let anyone know.

I agree with your assessment that the Google PageRank algorithm has changed over time. As to what those changes might be, we can only exptrapolate them from the observed results.

The idea that link text is a powerful part of both the SERPs and PageRank algorithm is correct. The question then arises as to how and why it's important.

There is the possibility that anchor text is related to themeing and to relevance, in the sense that they are all one and the same thing. There is also the more likely possibility that each is a separate variable in the algorithms.

What we are all trying to ascertain, is how the variables work together to provide the best possible results. To that end, we need to discuss the various ideas, possibilities, and probabilities.

Wayne Hurlbert