2 replies to this topic

[Thomas Johnson]

Hi there guys,
Most probably the answer of my questions is already in the forum somewhere, but I am afraid I could not find it.

1 - If a domain.com has PR 6 and you have a backlink to your site from domain.com/somepage.html with PR 0. Do you get any juice at all? If not, what is the point of linking to this page? [I believe I got an idea from the previous thread but will appreciate another point of view]

2 - When I check the backlinks with a website tool like smartpagerank.com I got around 150.

The results with a program like SEO Elite are quite different. i.e. less links.

Moreover, when checking with the Google toolbar I have less than 20.

3 - Some tools divide the backlinks to Google ones, Yahoo ones, etc. What is the difference? Suppose I target a link from a site X. How do I know if that will give me "Google" link, "Yahoo" or "Live" one?

Thank you in advance and sorry if that is the n-th time you see these questions.

[Randy]

1. So the link is going from the PR 0 to the PR 6 site? The direction is a little confusing with the way the question is written. Not that it really matters. Either way the answer is Yes, the link does provide value.

To begin with, there's no such thing as a perpetual PR 0 site, other than those domains that have been banned. If a site is new so appears to be PR 0, today's PR 0 site may well be tomorrow's PR5 site. Especially when viewed in the light that the only type of Public PR we can see is from a tool that is only updated 3-4 times per year. That's Public PR and is fairly useless as a metric. Real PR is updated constantly, so what the Public PR tool may show as a PR 0 site probably already has some Real PR if the site is already indexed.

2. Backlink tools will drive you crazy if you let them. Not only are all third party tools not created equally, they all use different methods to retrieve link data. And you really can't compare backlink data from each search engine and consider it the same thing. In other words, you're better off not expecting any of these tools to give you 100% perfection. They can't and won't.

As a general rule the tools that report fewer backlinks are trying to use the link: command at Google. Part of the reason they'll show you less backlinks is because Google's link: command has never shown you all backlinks Google knows about. It's always shown you a Selection of backlinks they know about. And they won't tell you what criteria they require to be included in this selection process.

3. How are the three different? Obviously it starts with the three engines having different data as a starting point. Beyond this small fact, and as mentioned above, Google's public link: tool doesn't show you all links. It shows you a selection. Yahoo tends to show more links, but they've got two different commands. Their link: operand presumes to show you all links they know about to a specific page of a domain. While the linkdomain: operand presumes to show you all links to a domain, regardless of the page within the domain links are pointing at.

The surest way to tell if a specific page on Site X links to yours is to view the Cache of the page as captured by the search engine. If the link appears in the cache it's a reasonably safe bet the link is passing some value to your site. Assuming of course it's a clean link that doesn't go through a jump/redirect script and isn't nofollow'ed at either the page or link level.

I'll warn ya though. If you get this hung up on each and every link you're going to end up wasting a lot of time that could be better spent on more important things.

[ScottSalwolke]

I use backlink tools to find many niche sites that often provide valuable links. For example, for a client that sells airplanes, I examined the links of their competition. I found many valuable web sites related to the aircraft industry that had link pages. Not only do these links help with rankings, but they provide avenues for people looking for aircraft for sale to find my client's site.