When You're Link Building, Does PageRank Really Matter?

by Denise Williams

As a conscientious online business owner, you're probably always looking for another link to your website. Not only do links help build your Google PageRank (PR), relevant links can increase your placement in search results and of course, the more links you have pointing to your website, the more likely it is that someone will find you while they're on another site. All important things to the survival of any online business.

It's hard to ignore PageRank when you're looking for new links. Whether you're building links by submitting articles, press releases, buying text links, or exchanging links, it's tempting to look only for sites that have a high PR.

For one thing, links from pages with a high PR can increase your PR as well. For another, websites with a high PR are often thought to be a little more credible than sites with a low PR. Obviously, others have visited this site before you and have thought it was worthwhile to link to it from their own websites. Building links from pages with no or a low PR might easily be thought of as a waste of time.

However, if you're avoiding sites that have a low PR, you could be missing out on some good linking opportunities. Don't forget that every site started out with no PR. Over time, the site you're looking at today might become a PR 4, 5, or 6.

Also, PageRank is known to be a little fickle. What is normally a site with a high PR could suddenly drop to a 0 or 2 for a reason only Google knows, and then jump back up again. You might just be visiting on an off day.

Finally, although Google is constantly updating its algorithm to give us the most reliable results it can, some site owners are just as constantly finding ways to work around it and build a high PR without following the rules. A higher PR does not necessarily mean one site is more credible than another.

There are some other ways to help you measure the credibility, importance and potential of a site. Alexa, http://www.alexa.com , can give you specific traffic details about the site you're looking at. Marketleap, http://www.marketleap.com, will tell you where that site's links are really coming from.

The most important question, though, is does it make sense for you to have a link, an article, or press release on the website you're looking at? Does it have good content that's relevant to your own site? Will the people visiting that site be interested in your link? If you can answer yes to these questions, the PageRank of that website shouldn't matter to you at all. You should have a link on that website just because it's a good idea for your business.

Article Source: The WAHM Shack Article Directory

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