How does many backlinks affect Page Rank?

[whitehatseosuite]

My website has over 5000 backlinks yet the page rank is zero while other internal pages with less than 500 backlinks have a page rank of 1. Does the many backlinks affect page rank? I am also wondering how can i improve my page ranks.

[peggyp]

It is totally depends upon page rank and quality of link you have gained. 1 Best quality, thematic link is far better than 10 non relevant low quality links.

[whitehatseosuite]

So what do you suggest if i want my page rank to go up, do i remove these many backlinks?

It is totally depends upon page rank and quality of link you have gained. 1 Best quality, thematic link is far better than 10 non relevant low quality links.

[peggyp]

Rather than focusing on PR, keep focusing on providing fresh and unique content, best UI and latest information about your product to your customers. Keep focusing on generating high quality backlinks and remove those link which are non relevant and having bad quality.

[whitehatseosuite]

Thanks for that advice though you have created additional problem by asking me to remove those links. Do you know of a better way to remove such many links assuming that some could have been profile links or bookmarks which came from hiring contractors in odesk?
Thanks for sharing.
Benard

[peggyp]

Benard,

It is totally depending upon you, if you feel that the link are natural and not generated to just improve ranks than keep it as it is. Better you read google webmaster guideline to understand link policy in details

[aviseo]

According to me, your Home Page PR has been distributed to inner-page. As well as, like other saying, yes it may happen due to low quality or un-thematic backlink. Please check the backlink thorough webmaster and make sure about the quality of the backlinks. If you find any irrelevant links, remove theme.

[ULTiMATE]

Don't bother removing backlinks. Poor backlinks don't really do anything, so you'll be wasting your time worrying about them.

Having 5k backlinks and poor ranking goes to show that low-quality backlinks do nothing for you. Google likes good back links from strong web pages.

[peggyp]

Pool quality backlinks may result in penalties from search engine. Here one should not have links from link farm or should not participate in link buying program otherwise he/she will have to face penalties.

Don't bother removing backlinks. Poor backlinks don't really do anything, so you'll be wasting your time worrying about them.

Having 5k backlinks and poor ranking goes to show that low-quality backlinks do nothing for you. Google likes good back links from strong web pages.

[ULTiMATE]

Pool quality backlinks may result in penalties from search engine.

Any proof for this?

If this were true then surely I could spam the links of my competitors and get them all penalised.

It can't be true, because it would leave a gaping hole in Google's search algorithm. A web page rarely gets penalised. They almost always just lose any positive ranking associated with a link.

[peggyp]

I am agree with your point of building poor quality link for competitors but here we are not talking about 10-20 or 100s links. Here we are talking about 5k poor quality links.

Regarding to proof, refer recent Google penalties which not only hurt website with poor links but also affect website has mass links from targeted "anchor text" (i found many website lost rank has links from good quality websites but they are targeting same anchor text). This is the reason Google has introduced Google's Disavow Links Tool to control your backlinks and bing has already introduced such tool before Google.

[TechnoBear]

Any proof for this?

Google's Webmaster Guidelines seem to confirm it (my bold):

Your site's ranking in Google search results is partly based on analysis of those sites that link to you. The quantity, quality, and relevance of links influences your ranking. The sites that link to you can provide context about the subject matter of your site, and can indicate its quality and popularity.

Any links intended to manipulate a site's ranking in Google search results may be considered part of a link scheme. This includes any behavior that manipulates links to your site, or outgoing links from your site. Manipulating these links may affect the quality of our search results, and as such is a violation of Google’s Webmaster Guidelines.

The following are examples of link schemes which can negatively impact a site's ranking in search results:

Buying or selling links that pass PageRank. This includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links; exchanging goods or services for links; or sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link
Excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you")
Linking to web spammers or unrelated sites with the intent to manipulate PageRank
Building partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking
Using automated programs or services to create links to your site

[Austinlanger]

It's going very crucial after panda and penguin updates by google because if you wouldn't have quality in your site's backlinks then it could be penalize by google.

[ULTiMATE]

Google's Webmaster Guidelines seem to confirm it (my bold):

But again, if this is true then what's stopping me from setting up a bunch of Virtual Machines and setting up some SEO spam tools to spam my competitors links around?

It's my belief that there is no negative impact, only a net loss impact, unless it can be explicitly proven that the rules have been broken. For example:

Buying or selling links that pass PageRank. This includes exchanging money for links, or posts that contain links; exchanging goods or services for links; or sending someone a “free” product in exchange for them writing about it and including a link

If it can be proven that money has changed hands then an entire site can be banned, and it's happened before.

Excessive link exchanging ("Link to me and I'll link to you")

Again, it is on the web spam team at Google to prove without reasonable doubt that this has happened. Sites have been banned by Google before when this has been proven.

Linking to web spammers or unrelated sites with the intent to manipulate PageRank

To me, this suggests that you have linked to this from your own site, rather than a site linking to you.

Building partner pages exclusively for the sake of cross-linking

Again, if this can be proven then you could be banned. This one isn't so hard to prove at times.

Using automated programs or services to create links to your site

This one is where I think their guide falls apart.

If, for example, I were a competitor of SitePoint, what is stopping me from spamming SitePoint using various linking tools? How could Google possibly penalise SitePoint for my actions?

The only penalising I can think of is the penalising of any natural links that were built during that time, but then surely this would be fixed at a later date after re-crawling?