Internet is based on community and what some people call peer review.
Always has been, and this is some of the basis of what Google
considers good external links. There are well thought out reasons for
this. If someone that owns a car dealership is linking to my page,
Google doesn't feel that the link is as important as say another
Internet Programmer linking to my page. A link from a page in the same
type of category is a peer review for better or worst. The link may
becoming from my competitor, inside an article that explains how much
I don't know about internet programming, and why you should stick with
him. That's okay, says Google, its still a peer, so the PR is higher
for my site. As they say about gossips, "Hey, at least they are
thinking about you."
A link from my website is helping Top Site Listing's PR, but not as
much as you might think. Their current PR is 5 and at the time of this
writing, mine is 4. Having a lower site link to a higher site is not
as good as the reverse happening. This is not to say it doesn't help
them, but its a lower calculation.
This is why the idea of getting 100 domain names and having them all
link to your main website is not really a worth wild idea. The 100
domains you purchase and setup are not going to have a high PR, in
fact, with this strategy, they normally don't have a PR at all. And if
they are all linking to each other, the web-bots figure this out and
call it spamming, and black list the whole lot of you.
Each page on a website has its own PageRank, so where you want links
to happen on the external site is on pages with a higher page rank
than you have on your index.html page. These will boost you up, and
its a good idea to have links that go back to them. A links page is
okay for this, but what is better is to place the links back to them,
inside content articles on your site. This improves your content as
well as your links. And thus you have a better PageRank as well.
The setup of internal links on your site is just as important as
getting external links, and this should be looked into as I pointed
out in another question. PR is not about one thing making a website,
in fact that is probably the base reason for creating it. It doesn't
rely on one key thing to improve your site. It takes in all things and
balances them against each other. Having a page that has no content,
for instance, and 100 links from high PR sites, isn't going to work
out, the webbot still has no content to index. A page of graphics and
links is the same thing. No out going links and less than 3 pages can
also set the PR low, even though external links are good and strong.
The best thing to do is to look at your page as if you were Google or
some other search engine. Your job is to get people to pages they are
looking for, and the best pages that you can find. You don't want
people frustrated when using your search engine, you want them happy.
So, you design a system that will get the very best pages first for
the client. Most people searching for things on the web are looking
for information, and information, in this day of age, is best shown in
text. Yes a picture speaks a 1000 words, but if you are Google, you
have no idea if that picture is any good unless you go look at it, and
you aren't going to do that, it would take way too much time. This
means you rely on sites that have text, more than one page and find
out if other sites of the same caliber like this site as well. You
want to provide Relevant Answers to those using your site to search
for them.
There's a lot more too it than that but it should give you an idea of
what they are looking for and how you need to setup your pages.
So the sites you want to have link to you are sites which are
basically in the same business and have a higher PR than yourself.
Remember that each page has its own PR, so if the front page has a 4,
it is likely, unless some calibration on the site has been done, that
a lower page will have a PR of 2 or even 0.
If you are interested in further and much more detailed information on
the Google PR setup, you can visit these sites
Google's explanation of PageRank
://www.google.com/technology/index.html
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine
http://www-db.stanford.edu/%7Ebackrub/google.html
webadept-ga |
Clarification of Answer by
webadept-ga
on
29 Aug 2002 12:35 PDT
Hi again,
Sorry if you took offence to the answer, I'll try to show it in a less
personal light, and address your key questions.
Is it bad that a person would link their sites together?
It was a popular tactic in the recent past that a dot.com would get
several domain names and link them together for the soul purpose of
building up the amount of external links to their sites. This worked
for a while, but as I pointed out, this isn't something that works for
the search engines. Search engines want to find the most "Relevant"
site to your query, and they don't want website owners to be able to
"control" listing status in such a superficial way. Is it bad that you
would link to your own site? No, its not, but do it sparingly and with
single links. Also make each of your sites "Relevant", meaning they
have several pages of text about the subject matter of your site and
if someone were to go to them, they would be satisfied with what they
find. Remember that one good site is much better than 10 meager sites.
Is that unethical from Google's point of view?
Ethics really don't enter into the equation. They want to do a good
job, as do most companies.
Am I a SPAMMER?
I can't answer that. You have on your sites things that are used by
Spam-marketers. Whether you are a spammer or just someone who thought
that it was a damn good idea to do this, is really something I can't
judge. But, the robots and engines don't do things on an emotional
level. 1 + 1 = 2 to them, even if you are using really big 1's.
One of the things that caught my eye (robertskelton-ga actually
pointed it out to me in another question) is that on
discountairportparking.net you are framing inside that index.html page
another URL
http://airportparkingreservations.com/cgi-local/customer/index.pl
The sites http://www.limo360.com/ and http://www.parkinglinks.com/ are
practically the same sites, same link sets in the same areas. Your
contact page on all of them is the same page,
http://www.parkinglinks.com/prklinks_contact.html
None of the sites appear to have more than 3 pages on their own URL.
A good example of what content and fuller sites can do for a PR is to
look at your own http://www.stopandsteer.com/ Which has a page ranking
of 4 of 10, instead of all the others at 2 or 10. This site has
several pages, and one external link from a context rich site :
http://www.asashop.org/autoinc/jan2002/top10.cfm
The PR on that page is 5, and just look at the content on that site!
The link you are providing for them on you page
http://www.valetpark.net/webdesign.html
is being ignored, probably because of the low rank it has and the very
little content on the site itself. Google doesn't see this as a
"Relevant" link.
Am I going to get blacklisted?
Who gets blacklisted and who doesn't is completely up to the Google
people themselves. I know that they don't like to blacklist sites, and
rarely do so, but I also know that they do use this if it becomes
necessary.
Answer to your question " What web sites that link
to me will help me in my page rank (specifically what sites e.g.
parking.com, valetparking.com, etc...)"
None of these will, the page ranks for each of them are too low to do
much good. The pages rank at 0, 1, 2. I don't see any above 2,
currently. You need a site that is a 4, 5 or a 6.
There are two things you can do. 1) find someone with a 4, 5 or 6
ranking that is willing to link to your site. This can be done several
ways, one of which is simply writing them and asking them. 2) Make one
of your sites a 4, 5 or 6. To do this you need to add lots of content
to the site and make it a relevant answer to queries.
A good page to read about the last option is here :
http://www.searchengineworld.com/misc/guide.htm
Thanks,
webadept-ga
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