Teaching Advanced Link Building and Why Pagerank Will Never Die
Posted on August 13th, 2008by Michael Gray in Link Development
One of the difficult things of trying to share ideas, or teach a concept to large group of people is the different levels everyone is at. What some people consider advanced others consider intermediate. The second problem is the larger and more diverse the audience, the more general and ambiguous the examples have to be.
Ask any advanced SEO to describe what they want in a link and you’re likely to get something like this …
“A keyword rich link from a well linked/important/popular page on a trusted and authoritative website, that is preferably topically relevant to your site”
The problem is that a definition like that has so many loosely defined concepts it’s borderline irrelevant to someone who doesn’t have some level of experience. The most ambiguously defined part of that statement is “trusted and authoritative website”, because there’s no real publicly available/agreed upon metric for trust and authority.
Enter the page rank conundrum. If I were to tell you I need you to work on getting me at least a dozen links from trusted websites in the next 30 days, how can you be sure you met my definition for trust? If I was to tell you get me a dozen links from websites with a page rank 4 or higher, it’s a much more clearly defined goal.
However page rank is no longer an accurate measurement of anything. Since google has admitted that they will adjust/manipulate page rank of sites they believe are selling links, and those adjustments will trickle down/out, page rank is really just for entertainment purposes.
We’re back to the problem of not being able to give a quick and easy metric to teach/show people what’s a trusted/authoritative website, and there’s no way for them to asses accurately. Lots of experts, myself included, use the NY Times or the Wall Street Journal as an example of trusted websites. While it’s true they are trusted, it’s a cop out answer. Since the only way you are going to get into those papers is do something newsworthy (like run over your neighbor with your parakeet behind the wheel of your hummer), or have a high paid PR person on your payroll, they are relatively unattainable.
The only real answer is research and gaining experience. Use lots of other metrics, alexa, compete, technorati, quantcast, hitwise, feed burner and page rank. Look for numbers/statistics that line up and correlate. Look at the blogs in that space, see who is getting the most citations/links. Getting a good grasp of the space is not something you can do accurately just by looking at the little green pixels in your tool bar, but until one comes up people will continue to use it as crutch, because it’s quick and easy, and nature abhors a vacuum.
Disclaimer
when I mention page rank in this article I am referring to published toolbar page rank. I am of the belief that there is an internal page ranks value that still matters. When you hear engineers say things like “page rank is still a factor in our algorthym” ask them if they are talking about published toolbar page rank, and then watch as they shuffle step and avoid answering the question entirely 
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August 13th, 2008 at 4:49 am
Ah… love the “Disclaimer” I agree with that 100%. The toolbar PageRank is worthless.
August 13th, 2008 at 7:11 am
This is very true indeed. Authority website links are hard to come by but if a site grows their links by taking a blended approach and a steady growth over time along with excellent, relevant content, the authority links sometimes come on their own…(almost a non-link bait).
That said, from my experience most sites need the basics and a solid link growth campaign of really good quality relevant links…forget Google page rank by iteself it is just for entertainment purposes!
August 13th, 2008 at 10:14 am
Michael,
Could you link me to where Google actually does say that TB PR is manipulate and is now mainly for entertainment? I generally (and loosely) agree with the statment but can’t find it in writing from Google (plenty from SEOs though).
Thanks,
Brent D. Payne
SEO Manager
Tribune
August 13th, 2008 at 1:02 pm
@Brent D. Payne: matt responded to comment somewhere where he said that but linked to it, and dammit i cant find it and i’ve really been looking too
August 13th, 2008 at 1:21 pm
[...] associated with what constitutes authority. Michael Gray wrote a post today talking about authority and PR and mentioned how id you ask an SEO what they want in a link you might get a response such as" [...]
August 13th, 2008 at 2:28 pm
Somewhat related - I took a SEO survey today and on most of the questions where it asked which tools I use I did not select any of the stock answers because I use our own custom programs and scripts.
Your post hits upon the reason every SEO office should have regular expressions and a programming language, even a simple one like PHP, in its kennel of expertise. You cannot do trend analysis and lead the SEO pack using the same free tools (most of them now ancient)that everyone else uses. And, most commercial SEO tools suck too.
August 13th, 2008 at 3:27 pm
Why not stop worrying about “trusted and authoritative” website and just focus on relevant ones help explain where to target your link building efforts.
August 13th, 2008 at 8:51 pm
@Brent
got to head home from work, but I’m sure you’ll be able to find it.
See if you can find a transcript of the “You & A with Matt Cutts” from SMX advanced in Seattle this year. He talked about adjusting PR to mess with people who were scraping it. Don’t have time to look for the link, sorry
August 13th, 2008 at 9:00 pm
FYI… I’m being welcomed as a StumbleUpon user even though I clicked here from Sphinn.
August 14th, 2008 at 7:34 am
It’s a very good pointer about the teaching element.
On the one hand, as webmasters, we seem imbued with an “open source” mentality of helping others if we can, despite no associated monetary gain.
And yet, too many people coming to SEO for the first time want to be baby-spooned into becoming an expert in all things SEO over night.
I think SEO is at heart a creative process, and requires a creative mindset that can draw on relevant webmastering experience of seeing how changes impact on the wild.
Yet people with little experience and no intention of gaining further experience, and no inclination to the creative process, expect to be able to be taught how to be creative and what experience is - and then promptly challenge us for our experience because they think difference.
I’m not referring to SEO hangouts, as much as general public forums - business & webmaster forums, for example, plus general interactions with the public.
This goes back to something I’ve said before - I think people need to develop decent experience managing multiple websites in order to learn, through experience, the basics of what constitutes the internet and its live environment, and how to work most constructively in that environment.
Once they do, hopefully it should be much easily to better understand the concepts that we’re trying to communicate.
2c.
August 14th, 2008 at 9:47 am
Great disclaimer, Michael! I often end up sharing that same exact disclaimer with clients and colleagues alike.
P.S. Back in 2004 or so, Rand and I toyed with the idea of trying to invent a third-party “PageRank” tool. Rand went on to become a rock star and invented “PageStrength”, which has now been replaced by a newer tool, but I don’t think he’s succeeded in undermining PageRank.
Hopefully, somebody (or a group of somebodies) will finally make it happen.
August 14th, 2008 at 11:58 am
The way I think of PageRank is as a unique number assigned to each document in Google’s index. It’s different from a permanent, unique ID in that fluctuates as Google’s indexing processes keep operating, but, nonetheless, each page should have its own unique “PageRank stamp” that orders it in the PageRank hierarchy.
What most people (and, unfortunately, sometimes even Google itself) call PageRank is actually a set of ten tiers into which each document can be slotted depending on its *real* PageRank, but those little green bars on your Google toolbar aren’t the PageRank itself, just the tier in which your page falls (and who knows if those tiers are divided evenly based on a linear, logarithmic, or some other function).
I also get a twisted pleasure out of comparing PageRank with karma, that is, the totality of what that page has “done” that gives it a unique value in the universe; just as every being has its own unique karma, so every page should have its own unique PageRank.
August 15th, 2008 at 8:14 am
I agree with the research aspect of link building. I get asked “how do you build links to a site?” many times. My answer is always, “by doing lots of research.” There are no short cuts to link building unfortunately. I’ve been doing this for almost 8 years now and if there was a short cut I would have found it by now.
Also agree with your PageRank statement. It reminds me of the adage “you can’t judge a book by it’s cover.” Well, you can’t judge a website by it’s PageRank.
August 15th, 2008 at 12:58 pm
I think you hit on a very important point that Mr. Turner eludes to as well. So often I hear ‘oh I ignore alexa because the data isn’t very solid’, or ‘quantcast just doesn’t work’… Most of the time its from people with very little experience in the industry. They fail to realize that while none of these systems are 100%; collectively, alexa, compete, technorati, quantcast, hitwise, feed burner, and even webmaster tools (G and Y!) paint a substantial picture. The key here though is understanding through experience where to draw the line and what the data is good for.
Cheers!
August 15th, 2008 at 3:52 pm
I have to say I do agree with you. Unfortunately because so many clients have got it into their head that pagerank is the be all and end all then trying to convince them otherwise is very difficult. I’ve found a good way is to get them to use firefox, and the seo plugin which shows them the truth.
Another good argument is that If pagerank mattered as much as it is claimed, wikipedia would be number one for everything!
August 15th, 2008 at 6:10 pm
Great post Michael. I’ve always thought of pagerank as no more then an indicator of is this website healthy, and does google like it (provided it ranks somewhere in the SERPs). Even then I’m not that fussy about what a good / authoritative link is, if I can find the site on a phrase relevant for my business I’m link building for that ranks for any particular phrase then its more then good enough for put a link on. I find too many people concentrate on only the higher PR links which makes it easy for your competitors to duplicate then throw some crappy quality links down with good anchor text and outrank you with both strength and number…
August 18th, 2008 at 1:42 pm
SEO Canada, regarding this statement “then throw some crappy quality links down with good anchor text and outrank you with both strength and number…”, I agree. I am seeing this more and more. In fact, I have seen a local site that launched a couple of months ago, with 10 pages, pass up 25 well-established sites with over 5,000 backlinks and there are not many that have any page rank at all. The site went from a PR of 0 to a 3 with the last update. There are those that say Google is looking at sites that get links too fast and it could hurt you…from what I am seeing this is not happening.
August 27th, 2008 at 12:36 am
I can’t remember the last time concerned myself with PR. The PR for a number of authoritative websites got smacked down a few digits not all that long ago. However, the serp position for many of these websites didn’t even make a twitch. I’m more interested in the number of unique inbound links to the website that are related to my topic. I will also see how they rank for their targeted keywords in Google. If it’s worth it I will move onto figuring how to get safe and effective placement.