I’ve been working with a professional SEO firm for about a year and part of the agreement is that they would “show me the ropes” so I could manage our online presense for the long term. I’m very interesting in the white hat side of things and definately leaning towards the “slow and steady wins the race” approach. We’re now ranking first page if not first or second for several keywords that apply to our company (commercial and personal insurance).
We have an always have been a PR1 (I know that this doesn’t mean a lot) and our competition is typically PR4. We’re started with about 90 backlinks and now have 400 or so. We now have a blog, traffic is up 600% over last year, and we’re converting traffic to sales.
Now with that said, I still have quite a few questions and am excited to find this forum.
With analyzing our backlinks and the backlinks of our competition I’m noticing that several sites seem to rank high when they have more high link values pointing to them. How does having high link values as back links help you? Is this something that I should focus on (getting more high value back links… not page rank, talking about link values of .5-2.5)?
Also, our site has a few hundred back links with a 0.0 value… does this hurt us or is a link a link a link?
How does nofollow links help/hurt you?
Tis very confusing.
I’ve seen lower ranked sites above other sites and sites with less backlinks again above other sites with more links.
I think quality over quantity might be key. I am by far an expert and will be analyzing these like you a bit further to find out why and what seems to work…
Also, google hasn’t done a proper update of pagerank since April or so. They are especially running behind. If I were you, I would be looking at Google Analytics and seeing if you have improved your traffic and rankings over time (and Google Webmaster Tools too). Then you can make some judgment about the advice you are receiving.
Thank you all for the replies… SEO is like drinking from a firehose to use an overly cliche term.
The reason I’ve been looking a link value is that I’ve been checking out our competitors to see what is working for them and then either trying to mirror it or exceed it.
I am not sure if this is accurate or not
http://www.checkpagerank.net/linkpack
Welcome to Sitepoint!
Pagerank is Googles way of measuring a pages perceived value when calculating what links to show for a given search term. It’s used as one of hundreds of different variables, but just because a page has a pagerank value it does not necessarily mean that it’s relevent to any particular search. Where a page does have relevence then it may be shown to the person doing the search - but how that is actually decided is Googles secret!
Having page with 0 pagerank link to you won’t “hurt” at all, a link is a link. Same with links that have the nofollow rel= attribute, although those indicate to Google that the link doesn’t pass any perceived “value” to the target site, that’s all.
People get far too strung up on PR. What’s much more important is providing your visitors with useful and relevent infomation that makes them want to follow through, for example by buying a product, leaving a comment, or making an enquiry - that’s what real SEO is about.
You can be linked from a PR10 for a page, but if you can’t convert visitors into customers what’s the point in having PR10?!
Yip.
It’s all very confusing. Google plenty and run your sites through a few of these things to analyse it…
http://www.checkpagerank.net/index.php[URL=“http://www.sussexweddingphotography.org.uk”].
https://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/mysites.
https://www.seomoz.org.
Register sites in
http://www.bing.com.
http://google.co.uk
http://www.yahoo.co.uk
There is far too much info out there contradicting itself, but work on all aspects.
Goog content
Good backlinks
Good PR
Nothing that displays Page Rank is accurate because Google do not make that information available to the public.
All Google make available to the public is a single digit number that they converted from the real Page Rank using a logarithmic scale some unknown period of time before they published it.