link exchange

I heard a recent rumour that google is not counting any backlinks from pages with a PR of 5 of less. Does anyone know if this is the case?

I don’t think anybody really knows. It would not make any sense though. If Google wants to give relevant search results and they don’t count anything below a 5 then that means eventually anyone or any business that is new will never get seen in their search results. Basically, if that is the case, most of the linking will come to a screeching halt and the search results would hardly ever change. And if that happens, Google will no longer be #1 because people like choices and not seeing the same thing all of the time. jmo.

What I’ve seen is that my best recent backlinks (a couple of fives and lots of fours) are not showing in the link:http://www.domainname.com command. And I don’t think I’m getting any credit for them as I am still stuck on PR3 from 3 months ago when I first started trying to get back links. (Have gotten many since) More strange behavior from Google is that I’ve had a couple of brand new interior pages show up as PR 7 for a few days and then go back to zero. Go figure.

As far as accepting links from sites that do no relate, it won’t hurt anything. You have no control over who links to you, hence the reason there will be no penalty for it. Does it help in rankings is the question though. What helps the most is similar sites linking to you with anchor text reflecting content on your site. Now, if you are reciprocating the non-themed link I wouldn’t do too much of that. I’ve got one page for non-gaming related links for that purpose but I don’t go out of my way looking for those links because I don’t think they will be of as much help.

I will link to any related site that doesn’t have the grey bar, meaning, their web site has been penalized/banned. It is more important to me that the site is related for anchor text purposes. I don’t care if it is a ten or a zero PR. A ten would be a nice miracle though! Of course, a lot of the established sites don’t want to link out to you if you are not a four minimum. Or because of rumour or speculation they believe a zero means the site is bad in some way. All this means is that the zero pages are either brand new, not yet spidered by Google, or there is not enough incoming PR to the index page to filter into the interior pages yet.

Another thing is I actually kind of like the possibility of getting related traffic from the links, not just for PR purposes. So, if a site has links pages and when I sign up I get put on page 37 (deep) there is virtually no chance anyone will see my site. It is why on all of my links pages I won’t list more than 20 sites for each page. And I don’t call my pages “links”. They are called names like poker or bingo, etc. And I look for similar type of pages when looking for backlinks. If I get enough recip. links going then I just create more pages if need be.