Do Inbound Links Relate To Page Rank?

This guy is SO wise.. Not to be weird but I constantly feel the need to spontaneously hug you, Andy...

For the others, what he's saying is directly out of the patent application:

United States Patent: 7058628

Here's the abstract for all those too lazy to click the link:

A method assigns importance ranks to nodes in a linked database, such as any database of documents containing citations, the world wide web or any other hypermedia database. The rank assigned to a document is calculated from the ranks of documents citing it. In addition, the rank of a document is calculated from a constant representing the probability that a browser through the database will randomly jump to the document. The method is particularly useful in enhancing the performance of search engine results for hypermedia databases, such as the world wide web, whose documents have a large variation in quality.

Ron,

I agree with you on preferring to watch the ranks of keywords on the SERPs. Typically I find that higher PR is a by-product of ranking well for my keywords.

My experience is that comments even at blogs or forums which are directly relevant to topic produce only a trickle of traffic, certainly far less than that which comes from search engines. And the traffic from search engines is very heavily dependant on SERP position, which in turn is affected (at least if the other factors are equal [I know that isn't common] by PR).

My original question is asked in a effort to make my link-building, which is very time consuming, more effective.

Amid the general uncertainty about the value of various link building philosophies, this strikes me as one approach we can be confident in. It's how I will be proceeding.

But still open to hear from anyone with test evidence about what works best.

Robert

Hi firewife,

And yet from Google's perspective every inbound link is also an outbound link. A link can't be one without also being the other.

PageRank flows from the page with the link (outbound) to the page the link points toward. Anchor text however effects the relevance of both the page with the link and the page it points toward.

If you plan your internal link structure carefully you can gain great benefit from strategically placed outbound links. The power of a link can vary greatly depending on how it's managed.

There is a tendency for many folks, especially on this forum, to emphasize massive backlink building (spamdexing) without any regard to strategy.

To use an analogy, the "just go and get lots of backlinks" approach is like a general telling his troops to fire in any direction at anytime as often as you can. You may eventually defeat your enemy, but at what cost?

Developing an effective strategy that leverages your effort you'll easily defeat a competitor with much less effort. There are so many keywords to conquer, marshal your resources wisely and you can get so much more with the same effort.