How is PageRank^® Affecting Your Targeted Traffic?

I’m going to rant a little.  The reason is – I hate misinformation.

I get very frustrated when I go from forum to forum and see some of the garbage you are being told by people imitating experts.

You see, these people are there merely to plant a link in the forum in hopes of grabbing some PR (PageRank) from the forum back to their website.

On the surface, there’s nothing wrong with the concept… but when you are doing nothing but spewing garbage simply in hopes of improving your own search engine rankings…

… well this is just as misleading as “guaranteeing” your product will get someone rich over night.

So let’s dig in a little deeper on PageRank and what you should really consider important…

Link Building to Increase Online Traffic

Amongst the many things frequently misrepresented is the value of link building in general.

Despite what the ignorant forum repliers will say (because they don’t do it correctly), link building is very important to your website search engine results. Why?

That’s easy — the internet is based on links!  Where links go, and whether they take you to relevant information is what is important to you as a searcher, so it is important to the search engines.

Therefore, you must build links to be successful with your SEO and search engine results.  (oh by the way, StomperNet’s Dan Thies states that there’s estimated to be over 57 trillion links on the net!).

Why Links Help Build Your Search Engine Traffic

Your search engine traffic is highly dependent on your relevance.  Building links helps build your relevance and authority on the subject you are “claiming” expertise in.

Some things about incoming links that you really do get by having the links are:

1. PageRank passed to you (this is link authority) from the sending page.  Each link passes a small amount of authority
2. The anchor text provides you additional reputation and link ranking if it is a relevant keyword or phrase. Note that you can’t always control the anchor text, so you will (and should) have links without the anchor text you desire.
3. If the incoming link is to “count” for your SEO, it must be found in the search engines.  A “nofollow” link won’t pass any of the SEO benefits, but often will send direct targeted traffic.
4. Image links can, and do, pass authority and page rank.  No anchor text or reputation will pass (“alt” tags do not do this, and are a waste of time to stuff with keywords), but the link itself passes authority and PR.

What to Focus on with Your Back Links

Here’s the bottom line — what the jury says — on grabbing PageRank from links as seen by Google…

No one really has a way to know how much “link juice” you’ll get from any particular link.

Don’t use the Google Toolbar to decide.  It does not show you how much page rank an individual page has.  It is a summary of the entire site that is 3 to 6 months old.  You can’t see the actual PR of any particular page.  Anyone who tells you different is just a scammer or a fool.

So obsessing on PageRank is, in fact, a waste of time.

The quality of the page where you ultimately get your link from is of prime importance.  This is something to “obsess” on if you want to obsess on something.  Pages constantly add or loose rank daily.  Over time things like “link farms” constantly loose value because the page rank is equally divided among the links.

Getting links from a page that is of lower page rank, but high quality, and limits the number of links is more valuable over time than links from high PR sites with tons of links from a page where your link resides.  Quality sites will gain PR over time.

So, I hope this is sinking in.  Inbound links to your site are vital to your SEO efforts, your search engine ranking, and the amount of targeted traffic you get from search engines.  The bloviating forum spewers that just write answers for links will tell you just about anything.  Use forums as a start for information, but find real authority – like StomperNet, or Pat Marcello, when you go to make a decision.

- Wayne Sharer

P.S. Pat Marcello is one of the absolute best.  What makes her best?  If you are ready to master SEO to the level where no one can pull the wool over your eyes, then you want to get in on here SEO training for the non-tech types.  I heard she taught a monkey SEO (well, maybe not).  But she could… Check it out here…

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