SEO Tycoon

**freelancevote** · 12-30-2007, 12:53 PM

Is it better to have a lot of backlinks from fewer websites or less backlinks from more websites? Let's say I joined ten forums and had 100 backlinks from each forum. Would Google consider this equal to having 1,000 backlinks from 1,000 directories?

**ForrestCroce** · 12-30-2007, 04:01 PM

Possibly ... only because most directories - with a few exceptions - aren't worth much. Just like forum links aren't typically worth much in terms of seo.

Links are absolutely more or less valuable in terms of page rank - which itself is overhyped - depending on where they come from. A good rule of thumb is the easier a link is to get, the less it will help in seo.

**chrishirst** · 12-30-2007, 04:23 PM

If you want to see what effect 15,000+ forum posts can have on the useless green bar go have a look at my site (first link in signature).

**ssandecki** · 12-30-2007, 09:30 PM

The actual answer to your question is yes AND no.

First, lets look at a few things about pagerank.

1. Every single web page on your site has it's own pagerank
2. Pagerank Algorithm is just like a voting system, inbound links equal a vote.
3. A web page can have multiple outbound links, they all count as a pagerank vote, just they give less "juice".

So, to answer your first question..... it doesn't matter, if you have a link on every web page for an entire site each page counts as a different vote, vise versa it has almost the same effect has inbound links from multiple sites. To say the least, you probably get more "value" per link if they are from different sites, but that is theory, as is 50% of all SEO.

Directories are crappy links because of all the outbound links per page, it bleeds almost no pagerank "juice" to each of those outbound links, same with most forums inbound links. Neverless the less they still have "some" value.

**cyberdog** · 12-30-2007, 11:22 PM

I never knew about these things. I thought a pagerank would just main the same for every page in a site.

btw, so it's not really advisable to pay for all those directories for backlinks to increase pR?

**ssandecki** · 12-31-2007, 12:19 AM

Yep, all the web pages have their own pagerank, hence the name "page"rank and not "site"rank

Actually, the whole Page thing is just being named after one of the creators, Larryn Page.

Save your money, don't buy text links or directory submissions. Depending on your site, you can pay for traffic with a respectable advertisers. Google AdSense, ValueClick Media, etc are just a few programs you could dump money into to produce traffic. If anything, traffic and promotional wise advertising with a network result would blow any directory submissions out the water. No to mention certian directories are penalized for selling text links\submissions.

Before anyone goes on about Yahoo! and their $299 fee you should read closely what it is for. It is for quick review of your site, not to get listed. Many sites pay $299 and still do NOT get added to the directory.

**ADAM Web Design** · 12-31-2007, 03:09 AM

Stephen pretty well said everything I would have said on the subject, and said it very well.

Not all backlinks are created equal, nor should they be. Generally speaking, the easier a backlink is to obtain, the less it will help in terms of the overall marketing scheme...and that's how it should be. Good sites should get organic links and traffic. Bad ones shouldn't.

There's one thing I'd like to add to this: a bad SEO backlink can be a great backlink in terms of direct traffic (something that reduces the reliance on search engines, who really don't owe anyone a thing and are capable of shaking things to the core on a dime.)

Let me give you an example of a bad SEO backlink:

http://blogs.tap.ibm.com

Go ahead, click on it: you'll get a DNS error. That means the site's either down or doesn't exist, right?

Wrong.

That site actually does exist, but it's not accessible to the outside world...it's part of IBM's internal network. It's accessible to anyone that has access to IBM's intranet, but not to the rest of us worthless peonoids. No precious PageRank is passed, no direct SEO benefit can possibly be obtained, so most SEOs would look at this (and have, when I've asked them) as a "crappy link to get".

So how do I even know about it?

I wrote a blog post that went through a 4-hour ordeal I had with IBM outlining their crappy customer service policies pertaining to a machine that they sold a client of mine an extended warranty for, something that IBM never records by default (yeah, it's stupid, but then again...it's IBM.)

I'm not sure whether it's because I used an IBM Technorati tag or what exactly the deal was, but a UK IBMer picked up on it and apparently wrote something about it on his blog with a link to my blog (don't ask me what it was he wrote, because it was part of blogs.tap.ibm.com). I saw hundreds of visitors over about a 2-3 day period to the blog. They mostly from the UK as opposed to the North American and Indian departments I was complaining about, but they were interested visitors, and I was able to engage a few and get official confirmation about the aforementioned blog network. I also had confirmation that I had at least gotten the attention of a large number of IBMers and made them think...sometimes that's how things get started.

So remember...a bad SEO backlink doesn't always equal a bad backlink.

**chrishirst** · 12-31-2007, 06:09 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by cyberdog

btw, so it's not really advisable to pay for all those directories for backlinks to increase pR?

A-B-S-O-L-U-T-E-L-Y NOT!!!! (advisable that is)

**dman_2007** · 01-01-2008, 03:01 AM

For pagerank, no matter how small value they pass, i think it doesn't really matter whether pages are on same site or different, but for SERP rankings i think it would be better to have less backlinks from more sites than to have large number of links from the same site, if the quality (and total no) of backlinks are same in each case. Though this conclusion of mine is based on logic not on any example or proof.