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Internet Marketing Coach
What’s That Link Really Worth?
September 23rd, 2007 | 6 commentsHow many times have you received an email, or seen an offer that claimed you could get a link on their high PageRank (PR) website for a few bucks, or for doing some random, small favor? I know I do alllllll the time. Years ago I fell for many of them, but now I know better.
So how do you know if a link is really worth your time, effort and/or money?
1. Does the “high PR” even exist? If it does, is the claimed PR assigned to the actual page where your link will be placed, or is that just the PR of the main page? For the beginners out there, PR is assigned to each individual page throughout the net. This means that if the index of a website is say a PR 7 and you’re getting a link on an internal page, it doesn’t necessarily mean that’s a good link. It all depends on the amount of “link juice” going to that specific page as well as other things that I’ll explain below.
2. How many other links are on the page where your link will be placed? This is the one that gets most people. The assigned PR for any given webpage is split up among all of the links on that page. This means that just because a page has been assigned a PR6 or whatever, if there are hundreds of other links on the page, your link is going to get a VERY small cut of that PR. This goes for both internal links and external.
3. Is the owner using shady techniques to restrict search engines (SE’s) from finding your link. There are three things you need to check - 1. robots.txt file. If they are disallowing the page in which they are offering a link in the robots.txt file, they are ripping you off because most major SE’s do follow the guidelines set in the robots.txt file and they will not follow that page, meaning your link will get no love by the SE’s. 2. Are they using the rel=”nofollow” attribute in the linking code? rel=”nofollow” is respected by some of the SE’s including Google. This tells some SE’s not to consider the link for indexing, some not to consider it for PR distribution and some for neither indexing or PR distribution. 3. Is the page where your link is supposed to appear using a nofollow META tag? The same goes for nofollow META tags, as does with the rel=”nofollow” linking attribute.
4. Is the site obviously selling text links? This is something that didn’t matter too much in the past, but with the recent buzz over Google’s dislike of paid links, there is a good chance that your link will get no PR distributed to it if the site clearly states that they sell text link advertising. This is a controversial issue, but Google has been known to strip sites of their ability to pass PR because of link selling.
All of these of course mean nothing if the link will actually drive targeted traffic to your site. In order to find that out you would just have to go through with it and give it a shot. Take a look at their rankings (Google PR, Alexa, Technorati if it’s a blog, Compete etc.) and make an educated guess whether or not the link will actually drive traffic to you.
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23rd September, 2007 at 4:08 pm
All very good points! To be honest, I don’t think I would ever pay for one link on one page. Why would I pay, when I can come to a site such as this (with nofollow disabled) and leave a comment that gives me a link.
I know exactly what I’m getting when I make a comment on a dofollow site (although the onclick part of the links on your site may actually stop Google from following - I’m not sure).
Now if we are talking about buying a link in the sidebar, which will show up on every post for a particular site, then THAT may be worth some money.
23rd September, 2007 at 4:29 pm
I think some links are worth paying for, but I like those that are contextual.
The comment links on this blog are followed after the commentor contributes more than 3 posts. There is nothing restricting the SE’s after that.
I’ve always liked sitewide links as well, but I’ve been hearing that Google may be discounting them anymore. I do know Yahoo loves them. I have an article directory with just a couple sitewide links on a couple other article directories and it’s ranking ranking 3 on Yahoo for “article directory”
24th September, 2007 at 12:50 am
Hi Josh,
I just wanted to clarify what I was saying about the onclick stuff. I read somewhere that the search engines may not follow links which have onclick in them. There’s quite a bit of confusion about this. Here is just one discussion I found about it: http://forums.digitalpoint.com/showthread.php?t=14132.
However it’s not confirmed that its a problem and when I had a closer look at the links in your comments, I noticed that what you’ve got is : onclick=”javascript:urchinTracker…
That looks like it’s from Google Analytics. I’d be extremely surprised if the Google bots don’t follow links with Google Analytics onclicks in the link. So there is almost certainly no problem here.
Sorry for getting away from the point of your post, which I completely agree with.
By the way, I just had a quick look at your article directory and it looks pretty good.
24th September, 2007 at 2:38 am
Hi Stephen,
I wasn’t sure what you meant at first, but after reading that thread I remember reading something about it a while back. The “onclick” within the links on this blog are generated from Rich Boakes Analytics plugin and everything has been followed and indexed pretty nicely actually. For the past month or two every new post is indexed with Google within 24 hours.
Thanks for the compliment on the article directory, although I’m not too happy with it. It’s run off horrible software (StarArticles) but it’s somewhat established so I keep it up. I have a few others up now that I’m working on, which run on better software.
24th September, 2007 at 5:20 am
P.S. There is also talk that Google may be partially reading some java as well.
24th June, 2008 at 4:10 pm
[...] isn’t nearly worth it. Most of the time these “top secret” high PR pages aren’t nearly as valuable as you think and how long did it take you to find it? It’s just not worth it. The time you spend searching [...]