PageRank question…

BC,

I don’t know why this is happening for you, but it has happened before in two pages of mine.

I think that Google see the “partners” page as a low value one, giving it a lower PR. Depending on the amount of links, it may even get removed from the index.

Hope it helped.

maybe it will help if you get some good links to that page
and/or put some text in between all the links

Often partner pages will no longer rank as well as they used to for many reasons.

My theory is that google can distinguish link pages due to the way in which we have set up this whole link exhcnage monster…

Let me explain….many of us have specific anchor text and descriptions that we use for our exchanges….some of us have been using the same ones for years….

Over time, google will see this same description etc…on hundreds (or possibly thousands) of websites around the web…

Once they see pages that contain these descriptions, that also exist on hundreds of other websites, it’s a fairly easy jump for them to determine these are link partner pages.

Now I will not say that the partner, or resource pages or whatever are worthless….but I think it makes a small bit of sense for google to rank those pages a bit lower than other pages in your site….(obviously there are exceptions to this….as some sites are designed in such a way to show these pages as more of the actual content of their sites…however this can be dangerous since all the pages would be filled with hundreds of little one and two sentance paragraphs that were actually duplicate content on hundreds of other websites.)

Now some here may disagree with some of these theories….and some may not….

I hope that some of this may stimulate the discussion more….because I would keep an open mind and be willing to adjust how I feel about some of this after hearing more theories and ideas…

Rick
Universal4

Link exchanges are important with websites that have related content. Google understands that webmasters will exchange links, this is one of the beauties of SEO. IMO I would not worry about what you name the section but rather not to overwhelm your links section with to many links. Try to think out of the box when setting up the link directory structure and find solid related links, less sometimes can be more powerful.

Brad

Content is the key. But honestly, you’ll never truly figure out Google and their pagerank. Run a quality site with good content and nice backlinks and hope for the best sometimes

Personally, I think you have too many links on that page (>60). I’d try to split it into subpages, each one with no more than 20 links.

Although it’s tempting to allow webmasters to dictate what anchor text you use for their link, you quickly end up with a lot of generic-sounding links. For example, you have 6 ‘Online Casino’ links, none of which are actually online casinos!

Think of what that page offers to your visitors. Your Casinomeister link for example just says ‘online casino’ – no description, no site title, no way of anyone knowing what that link is all about. Try to persuade webmasters to allow you to write your own descriptions. If you do it in a way that presents their site well, very few will object. And those that do? You don’t need the backlink that badly!

Another aspect of using a set text is that you can run into duplicate content issues. Even if webmasters insist on you using a certain script, you can always add some text of your own to make it unique.

One final point – your ‘Partners’ page is there purely to get backlinks (ie it’s not really for your visitors’ benefit) Unless your link partners object to it being PR0, why worry? As time goes on and your home page gets more PR, you can start to be more selective about who you really want to partner with. My advice on that is to only exchange with people you have already formed a relationship with – ones you keep in contact with and can trust. You’ll know who they are! Good luck…