The Great Backlink that Isn’t…

It sounds like a great offer. You can get a nice PR5 link for well under market value.

Remember that whole “if it sounds too good to be true” thing? That might be the case here.

No, we’re not talking about people faking page rank. That’s a different story. In this case, we’re talking about dropped or repurposed domains.

Here’s what happens. Someone has a blog. They maintain it. It gets a gob of great backlinks. It’s PR soars. And then something occurs. The webmaster abandons the project. Why? There are variety of possibilities. It might have been a blog about a specific time-bound event that’s now passed. It might be because he or she couldn’t resist reaching into the black hat cookie jar and the displayed PR hasn’t caught up to reality yet. There could be any number of reasons.

Now, either the original owner or someone who bought the blog from him or her (or who picked it up after domain expiration) is offering you a link. The blog may still be in its original form or, as is often the case, the old content may have been stripped out and replaced with something else.

Obviously, that PR5 link isn’t worth a hoot if the links pointing to the site are now dead-ending because of page changes. You don’t want to invest anything in a site that’s found its way onto Google’s blacklist, either.

So, how can you check? Do a little homework. Run a backlink checker on the site and find out if its inbound links are still hooked up with actual content. Head over to the Wayback Machine and check things out. See if the site has been shedding pages or if anything else fishy has been going on. Ask to see some traffic numbers and look for recent declines. And use a little sense. If the domain name and the content seem like a very poor match you might be barking up a useless tree.

Sometimes a great backlink isn’t so great.

Obsessing Over Page Rank? Stop.

Page Rank.  It allegedly tells us how valuable Google believes a site to be.  It theoretically plays a role in how sites are treated with respect to search engine results.  Google won’t let us peek under the hood of its algorithm, but it will let us know an idividual site’s Page Rank.  Thus, it’s not surprising that so many site owners develop more than a passing interest in the those little green bars that express just how “important” a site may be.  They become obsessed.

Is it really a good idea to be that concerned over Page Rank?  Not everyone thinks so, and there are some very good arguments against the development of a Page Rank obsession.

Sites with low Page Rank often outrank those with higher Page Rank.  That should be a clue that PR isn’t the end all, be all of SEO, don’t you think?

Low and no-PR pages can dominate for specific search terms.  This is especially true when you go out and target a long tail keyword.  If you’re one of the only pages out there optimized for the term, there’s a strong likelihood that you’ll outrank even a high-PR site that isn’t exactly on-point.

Sites that get their PR sliced and diced can still experience even more traffic.  If Page Rank is that important, that kind of thing shouldn’t be happening, should it?  Remember, traffic is what we’re all really interested in, after all.

Page Rank is an indicator, not a dispositive factor.  Page Rank represents Google’s assessment of a page’s importance.  Importance is undoubtedly determined by looking at a number of factors, many of which undoubtedly play a role in search engine performance.  However, importance is not the determining factor nor would a look at importance necessarily involve an examination of all factors related to the the highly-complex Google algorithm’s process of determining where to rank a page for a specific search query.  In other words, it has some meaning.  That meaning, however, is only a indicator of how a page might be doing with respect to one part of the SERP calculation process.  

Conclusion?  Enjoy it if it’s high.  Don’t sweat it if it drops a little.  Use it as an indicator, but don’t spend your life obsessing over Page Rank.

Using Cache Date Info to Your SEO Advantage

So, you have a shot at securing a link on a good-looking high-PR page. That sounds like a sure winner, doesn’t it?

Well, before you fork over the cash (or do whatever quid quo pro might be necessary to get it), there’s something you need to check. Go to Google, find the page you’re looking for in the SERPs and take a look at the date upon which that page was last cached–or, in the case of some scenarios, if it’s been cached at all. PixelHead breaks it down like this:

Check for cache with the site:url and with out the site:url. I believe that using the site:url returns pages that have been visited by the Google Spider that does deep searches, which are done with less frequency. If paying for links, I want to make sure that the links are cached by regular spiders as well as deep searching spiders for more Google juice for the link.

What you find might surprise you. Some pages and sites get visits from the Googlebot a few times every day. Others, even ones with impressive PageRank, see the spiders less often than you see your great aunt Edna who lives on the other side of the country.

You can find out which category a site falls into by looking at that cache date. That information is going to give you a good idea of how important Google really thinks the page is. If the search engines don’t feel a site’s worth checking out more than once in a blue moon, you should have reservations about its ability to help your site as a backlink source. As one forum commenter noted:

Since you need “quality” backlinks, you can start out by checking the cache date in Google. In the search box enter: “cache:www.thedomainname”. If the cache date is more than a month old, or worse yet, unchached, you might not want to waste the effort.

It actually goes a little deeper than that. Cache date isn’t just a good way of seeing how valuable potential link locations are. It’s also a good way to assess whether your site (or those of your competitors) are really as impressive in Google’s eyes as you might think.