6 replies to this topic

[ClickClick]

If somebody sets up a link on the home page of a highly popular website that's PR4, but there are already say, 100 other links on that page, will that diminish the importance of the link?

What if the great majority of the other links were to pages within the same website? Does as much page-rank still get given away, and therefore taken away from the link in question? What about if there were 100 internal links and, say, 20 external links but the link being set up was higher in the page than any other the other external links? Would it be worth it (if the link was paid for)??

[Jill]

If somebody sets up a link on the home page of a highly popular website that's PR4, but there are already say, 100 other links on that page, will that diminish the importance of the link?

Yes. The amount of PageRank it passes is spread amongst 100 links, so they each get 1/100.

What if the great majority of the other links were to pages within the same website?

The same URL on the same website, or different URLs within the website?

If it's the former, I would guess then only one of those links are receiving the link juice. If it's the latter, then I believe it's still spread amongst the 100.

What about if there were 100 internal links and, say, 20 external links but the link being set up was higher in the page than any other the other external links?

My opinion is that where the link appears would be of no consequence.

[OptimalPages]

This is the poster child for the age-old question: quality vs. quantity. I've drawn some conclusions about the power of link juice and how it's passed on based on my own results and the conclusions of several others. Jill, please correct me if I'm wrong, but here are some positive influences on how potent that juice is:

- In reference to PageRank, a link carries more weight if the linked site has a higher PR than yours.
- Keywords contained within the anchor text (not only for the linked site, but yours as well).
- Number of total links on the page and how they relate to each other.
- Relevance of:
- - The linked site to yours.
- - How the link relates to surrounding text in content.

[Jill]

- In reference to PageRank, a link carries more weight if the linked site has a higher PR than yours.

No, I don't believe that is true.

[ScottSalwolke]

- Number of total links on the page and how they relate to each other.

I'm not sure what you mean by this?

[OptimalPages]

I'm not sure what you mean by this?

By number of links, I mean that when you're writing content, there needs to be a number of in-context links in proportion to what has written. Meaning, if you're writing a page about widgets and it contains 200 words, then 20 links contained within the content is too much. I'm not sure that there is a correct link-to-text ratio, but it would seem that fewer links with higher relevancy would carry more weight than a lot of links.

By how they relate to each other, I mean that if in that same widgets article you have 4 links relative to the content, and 1 link to a site about an apple pie recipe, then the quality of that link is diminished and weakens the value of the others.

Using an analogy....

Let's say you have 100 total PageRank points to spread around. If you have 100 links, that means you're getting a 1% PR value (1/100) per link.
If you have 20 links, you're getting a 5% PR value (20/100) per link.
5 links = 20%

This is assuming that all links are high quality, relevant links. If a link isn't relevant, then I would argue that you lose points off the total. Now instead of 100 PR points to go around, you only have 90. Which means those 5 links are now only worth 18% instead of 20%.

[Jill]

This is assuming that all links are high quality, relevant links. If a link isn't relevant, then I would argue that you lose points off the total.

In terms of strict PageRank, relevancy isn't a factor.