Google Page Rank

[jellifish]

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Hope you can help - can you tell me if its still worth swapping links to improve on page rank? keyword ranking? traffic in google?

(Yes i know arnt we all) lol!

I have 2 sites with PR5 which id like to increase traffic to naturally. Would swapping links with any of your guys of PR5 and higher help?

Im doing pretty well for "student discounts" - but id like to know what other keywords they are doing well for. Any tools you can suggest to help me with this?

Id also like any indicators on where to start with analysing positions the other search engines as im not too clear best way to do this.

Any advice appreciated sorry if i sound a little inexpereinced please bare with me.

all the best
amanda

[jellifish]

thanks - how about the page rank and the swapping links option to increase traffic?

[Barry]

Hi amanda, swapping links with other sites that are similar will help your rankings in google (and other engines) as well as maybe gaining incoming traffic directly from the link exchange itself. So its a good idea to try and exchange quality links with other sites.

Although be carefull not to submit your page link to FFA's or other mass linking schemes as these types of incoming links can often damage your rankings as they can be seen as 'spamming'.

[jellifish]

Hello Murray
I signned up for the analytical tool on google. They arnt taking new users at present ... any other suggestions?
Thanks again
Amanda

[flanok]

Hi,
You need to be careful with link swapping when it comes to Google.
The SEO forums now state that google does not like any link swapping at all, probably because it is unlikely to have happened naturally, no matter how good the sites are you link to.
They state that links only help you when they are one way.

You can create one way links by writing ezine articles and publishing them with your link on. (Some of these sites have quite a high page rank).

Or you can create a 3 way link system. with 3 sites.

I learned the hard way, I have hundreds of links to and from from my sites and have quite good ratings in Yahoo and MSN.
Buy Google does not like my linkswapping at all.
I bought all my sites from the same company and the same server and google even knows that!

You talk about page rank of 5. Most SEO experts beleive that page rank has no relation to what position you rank on Google. As more and more ,we see low page rank sites doing better than the high page rank sites.

Only My opinion, hope this helps.

Mark

[eskimo]

It would be interesting to see how a the SERPs would look if reciprocal links where completely ignored. I would imagine it would cut down the number of 'spammy' SE results - an issue which is going to increase in profile over the next 12 months.

[Mogga]

And you don't think them ignoring one way links isn't further along the line?
They can all be fiddled too if you're spammy enough.

What else is a sign of a good site?

People bookmark it and return to it. This sort of info is increasingly available to search engines and will be more important perhaps.

[andy_jacko]

google analytics?

we all put analytics on our sites and google knows how much people use it therefore rate it higher and puts you higher up the serps.

[CompareStore]

We have gone from Page Rank 6 to a current rank of 4 during this year and we are experiencing our best positions and therefore traffic in Google ever!

People get all hung up on their home page PR which has always made me laugh (and yes I used to as well).
The home page is just one page on the site and will only ever get a good ranking for a small number of keywords. My advice - ignore PageRank and create lots of great content pages that people will want to link to.
Each page should target a different keyword.
Treat your home page as if it is just like any other page on your site and don't expect the majority of your visitors to ever even see it.

Reciprocal linking IS effective (at the moment anyway) as long as:

1. You exchange links with sites of a similar topic to your own
2. The link is NOT on a "links" page but is part of a content page
3. The link text targets the keywords you are trying to get a ranking for

I agree that inbound links hold a lot more weight but there are only a very small percentage of sites that are able to attract such links in any quantity so Google has to use other factors including reciprocal links as well in determining a page's rank.

If you spend some time creating at least 10 new, useful pages of content each week and make sure they are linked from your home page (with an indexible, text link) and then get maybe 2 or 3 reciprocal links for those pages you should start to get some one way links in time too.

[pricethat]

I second comparestoreprices comments, we are currently on a page rank 4 with less than half the pages we had indexed 2 months ago. The more the amount of pages fall and page rank the traffic seems to increase.

From looking at what is indexed, it is only reall the pages that are important that get the traffic so i would really forget about pagerank. To be honest it wouldnt suprise me if it wasnt completely dead in googles eyes or at least a fraction of what it was before in the algo's

[twibo]

I don't bother swapping links any more. Haven't for years. If the only reason you're doing it is to increase you position on the search engines and it doesn't benefit the user / customer it's spam and therefore dangerous. That said, manipulating your internal PR is no bad idea.

[thetafferboy]

keeping it simple:

page rank is solely determined by inbound quality links
recipricol links dont help

[CompareStore]

Sorry to be contrary but reciprocal links do help but nowhere near as much as one-way links.
As I stated previously if Google discounted all reciprocal links it would have very little left to use and you would find that beyond about page 3 you would start seeing sites with only 1 inbound link!

You say "only links that benefit the user" are valid but Google uses programs to determine the relevance of a link so how would it know if the link is of benefit to the user? What it can do however is look at the context of the site and the text around the link and determine how relevant the link is in relation to the site being linked to. If it's relevant, on topic, not simply a list of obvious links then it will help.

One-way, outbound links help too!

[thetafferboy]

You say "only links that benefit the user" are valid but Google uses programs to determine the relevance of a link so how would it know if the link is of benefit to the user? What it can do however is look at the context of the site and the text around the link and determine how relevant the link is in relation to the site being linked to. If it's relevant, on topic, not simply a list of obvious links then it will help.

That was summed up in the term "quality"

Sorry to be contrary but reciprocal links do help but nowhere near as much as one-way links.

if you were to quantify that, i'd say 1 inbound, one-way link is worth 1,000 link trades.. therefore it's not worth the time and it is worthless. Unless of course you use "nofollow", discount your links page in robots.txt or make it a js link.. then you can get a sneaky (if somewhat unethical 1-way link)

One-way, outbound links help too!

Outbound links have a negative impact on page rank

"Do outbound links improve your ranking?

No. This is a myth."

quoted from sitepoint seo faq http://www.sitepoint.com/forums/showthread.php?t=182915

[thetafferboy]

google analytics?

we all put analytics on our sites and google knows how much people use it therefore rate it higher and puts you higher up the serps.

that's a good thing