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I’m confused! I thought it’s good to have a lot of links on your page because then a lot of people have links back to you, and this boosts your PR, etc?
Your homepage is generally the highest PR page of your site. (Usually, not always, but usually.)
Every link on your homepage, whether it’s to an external page or an internal page, passes a certain amount of PR to the pages it links to.
The more links you have, the less PR each link passes.
The theory is that you want to pass as much PR as possible to your internal pages, so they do well in the rankings, and because they pass a certain amount of PR back to the homepage as well.
Imagine it as a bunch of soldiers. (I think Classics used this metaphor.) If you have 1000 soldiers (PR), and you have 10 links on your page, you’re sending 100 soldiers to each of those links. If 5 of those links are to someone else’s page, then you’ve only got 500 soldiers left for your own pages.
That’s a massive over-simplification, I know, and Classics usually does a better job than I do of explaining it, but I hope it’s helpful.
Webmaster World’s Link Development Forum is a good place to get more info too.
Hope that helps!
Thanks Randy, you’ve been very helpful to me today! But then why does everyone always want as many links as they can get? Why are so many people concerned with exchanging links if it hurts you? Or are you saying, it’s okay to exchange links, but you want to do it on a special links page, not directly from your homepage?
Hojalata wrote:Or are you saying, it’s okay to exchange links, but you want to do it on a special links page, not directly from your homepage?Yes, that’s the key.It is good to put A FEW excellent links on your index page, and the rest on a seperate page.
If you want to exchange links with some of the top sites, they will usually insist on visible index page links.
This is only beneficial if they are top sites, I understand. But I am not very educated on this.
I like Randy’s explanation.
I had a lot more soldiers leaving my site than I was receiving in return. Also, I’ve read many times, and often right here at CAP, that the outgoing links on a homepage should be limited to 10 or less.
I have a lot of work before me if I want to achieve that goal!
“But then why does everyone always want as many links as they can get?”
Not to directly answer your question, but most people don’t know what they are doing in this area.
Exchanging links doesn’t really increase PR. It’s just an exchange. You get 50 soldiers from one page, you send them 50 soldiers. Of course if you send 50 PR3 soldiers, and get 50 PR5 soldiers, then that will increase pagerank. But between equal pages it just shuffles soldiers around.
Outgoing links are good to help define what your site is about, not for anything having to do with pagerank. Link exchanges get you anchor text from different domains and IPs (and visitors) but they do next to nothing in terms of pagerank. The “better” a page (in the search engine’s opinion) that you get links from, the more valuable they are in non-pagerank ways, but then that gets complicated in the same way as pagerank… too many links on a page sends an impression that the linked-to pages aren’t very important, even if they are links from a page the search engine thinks is a nice page.
Unless you have a one page domain, your pagerank priority should be to recycle the pagerank throughout your own pages, rather than aimlessly pass it back and forth from other domains. A site with a PR5 main page and PR2 interior pages is blowing it.
All this information is making my head spin lol! But I am learning a lot. So, simply put, how do you get your page to show up higher in people’s google’s searches?
Everything that I thought would aid this in happening is ending up not to be true!! First I thought the way to do this on google was to do a good job with your meta tags and keywords. Then I found out meta tags don’t matter with google. Then I thought it was with getting people to link back to you by exchanging links. Then I found out this is only like trading soldiers and can actually end up hurting you. It can only help if you’re exchanging links with someone who has a larger PR than you, but then who would want to exchange links with me because they’d be exchanging links with someone of a lesser PR!Getting people to link to you is the best way to get high rankings in Google.
Getting important people to link to you is important. (Theoretically, although lately?…)
Linking to quality sites is also not a bad idea. Because it shows Google that you know what a high quality site is.
It’s a whole mix of things, and no one knows the secret recipe 100%. All you can do is read until your eyes hurt, experiment, and keep building content and getting links.
“So, simply put, how do you get your page to show up higher in people’s google’s searches?”
There is no simple answer. You have to do many things.
“Then I thought it was with getting people to link back to you by exchanging links. Then I found out this is only like trading soldiers and can actually end up hurting you.”
Things are not simplistic. Exchanging links can have value as I mentioned above, but generally not from a pagerank perspective. A positive on one side of the ledger might lead to a negative on the other… like paying for an ad, you have to pay, you don’t get it for free, but you will either decide the ad is worth it overall or it isn’t.
“It can only help if you’re exchanging links with someone who has a larger PR than you”
In terms of PR yes, in terms of rankings, no. A higher PR link page getting a lower PR link from a topically relevant main page could make perfect sense and benefit both sites.
It’s a stew, and fiddling with the ingredients can make it better (or screw it up completely).
Same goes for all my sites – I see you link on my homepage, and it’s not reciprocated by links of equal weight, they’re coming off.
I’ve learned as I’ve gone along how to do this correctly, and I’ve made some glaring errors in the past and am correcting them now.
In the past, I’ve exchanged interior links for a link on my homepage because my PR was lower (and I didn’t know any better) – but now the PR situation has either evened out or actually reversed for these past exchanges.
While I would love to be sweet and give all my friends good links, I have to think of business first. Give a friend a box of chocolates, not a link. :cheers:
I know that this is not a popular opinion… but…
Pagerank doesn’t matter! Dont worry about it, it does not affect rankings whatsoever. On an average a higher pr site will rank higher but that’s only because they have more incoming links and have been around longer.
