If you are not aware of the importance of links yet, then check this post on what it takes to get more traffic.

The obvious question that comes after is, “How do I get links?”

I would rephrase this and ask, “What are the most effective links and most effective ways of getting them?”

Here we have links that in my opinion are NOT effective: links from Yahoo Answers, blog comments, forum posts, Squidoo, Hubpages, Answerbag, Yedda, submitting to hundreds of directories (total waste!!!) and most of other Web 2.0 links.

SO what are the most effective links (that once you get them the rankings and consequently traffic of your site will go up significantly)?

These are links from high page rank pages of quality related sites.

That is it. This will give you the most bangs for your buck – or the most link juice for the effort you put in.

These links will be the 80/20 that will be driving the rankings of your site.

The system you’re about to see is what I did for all of my sites that do well. Like I said in the title of this article, this system is boring and takes a lot of time. These links are typically hard to get and it takes time and perseverance to get them.

But once you do, your rankings improve significantly and so does your traffic.

You can basically laugh at those people doing blog commenting and answering Yahoo Answers (both no-follow) who have taken the easy route and hope for a miracle.

If it was that easy to get quality links, one could outsource comments and answers to freelancers and in a few months your site would have thousands of links and you would be on top of rankings without any hard work.

It is impossible.

Everyone would do that. So Google must have tougher rules and algorithms to determine whether your site deserves top spots.

The key rule here is that your site must have high PR links from quality related sites (many of them).

The Boring Link Building System That Works

What I have done for all of my sites that are doing well is I researched other sites in my niche, looked at where they got links from and tried to get them for myself from the same places.

I also tried to get links from the sites in my niche that ranked well.

There. That is what I have done and that is why sites rank well. There is your magic secret to success online.

Except that it is tedious, boring and frustrating to get links that way. It’s much easier to answer a question on Yahoo Answers, comment on a crappy blog-post and then feel good pretending that you actually built some links today.

If you did not build one PR1+ link at all – then nothing significant will happen to your rankings. You are just avoiding the real hard work that gets results.

But back to finding links that actually work…

Here is a system you can follow infinitely long and you will never run out of ways of finding quality links:

1. For every keyword that you add an article to your site, do a Google search.

2. Check top 10 (or 20 if you are really a hard working person and you are determined 100% that you really want to become financially free) sites for that keyword and see if they exchange links or whether they accept articles from other sites or whether they link out to other sites from within their content.

If they do, contact them and start negotiating. Suggest a link exchange or submitting an article with a link back or something else that might get you a link.

3. The MOST IMPORTANT next step: Do a link analysis in Yahoo.com (by typing link: www.domain.com) and see where that site got their back links. (Of course, do that for all top 10 (20) sites in Google that show up for your keyword search)

4. Try to get links from the same places! If those other sites were willing to link out to your competitor’s site, then they might link out to your site too.

5. And where did those other sites that link to your competitors get links from? Do a link analysis for them and see where they got links from! Go to #4 and repeat #4 and #5 as long as you want.

6. Once you get really tired doing that or better, get a few PR1+ links, start with #1 again. Every time you build a page for a certain keyword, start the process of getting links that work with #1.

That is all.

That is the process of building links that significantly affect your rankings and traffic – in a positive way of course.

The other links: Yahoo Answers, Answerbag, forum posts and other Web 2.0 links HAPPEN automatically exactly in the way they are supposed to happen!

Some of the gazillion people that browse the Internet and use those sites will come across your site and mention it because it provides quality content. That is how those links are supposed to happen – and not by you adding them there.

These links help perhaps 0.5% with your rankings and I certainly will not waste my time building them. They will happen eventually because other people will build them for you.

You need to realize three things while you are doing this:

1. You may contact 10 sites and only 1 will reply. If you get a PR1+ link, it is worth it, trust me. You will never run out of sites because you can simply run the #4 and #5 indefinitely.

2. If you are just starting out and your site has a page rank of 0, then it is going to be tough to get links from high PR sites. A PR1 site is more likely to give you a link than a PR5. You might also get lucky and that PR5 link can change your life.

So go with your gut or just simply keep trying. I know that I got a few lucky links like that and that got me PR3 from a PR0 in a few months. Once I had PR3 it was much easier to negotiate a better link exchange. Other sites started to contact me for link exchanges and I had many more options.

3. You will be doing this hard work ONLY ONCE per site. I typically worked hard for links for about 6-12 months per site. Once you establish your site high in the rankings, you will start getting organic links.

These are links when other sites just link to you because they feel you as an authority on a certain topic. To become an authority and occupy top rankings, however you will have to do the hard work.

Once you get there, you get the unfair advantage – you get one-way organic links and solidify your rankings on top. Remember the saying, “The rich get richer.”

That is how it is with top sites – they have tons of links and they just keep getting them automatically. Get to that place.

Keep that goal in mind while you get no answers from 10 emails you sent. Keep trying and looking for ways to get quality links to your site because once you do, the work stops.

You are showing on top of rankings for your main keywords and the traffic and income keep rolling in without you doing anything.

The system you see above is the real key to getting links. If you believe you have found another system where you can “easily” get links, it will not work, trust me.

The only system that gets real outstanding results is the system that takes a lot of work.

That is how Google (and life) weed out losers from winners.

It is like that in all areas of life and it is the same with your online business.

What usually needs to happen is for you to get lucky at some point, get a PR4+ link and see how your traffic almost doubles just because of that. That will hopefully wake you up and motivate you to keep doing the tedious work of building links that work.

And if you keep in mind the outcome you’re looking for, then working on these links will not really be boring. It will be exciting and for every link you will get you will feel that you are one step closer to freedom.

——————————————————–

Hi Tomaz,

I know you always stress in the forums how important getting back links is. I’m just starting up serious link campains for my 2 year old site and also my 5 month old sites and I wanted your experience and advice on something.

I always tend to link to the home page when I do (what little I’ve done) link building but I imagine getting a nice range of deep links would be even more beneficial. If you had to allocate 100% of your inbound links to all 3 tiers of your site how you would do it?

Homepage 50-60%
Tier 2 – 20-30%
Tier 3 – 10-20%

…or does it not even matter? Can we just vary the link text, link everything back to the home page only and still get good results?

Thank you for any insight you can offer.

———————————

I typically build links to homepage first. Since I optimize my homepage for at least 3 different keywords, I try to get links to it with those keywords in link text.

Once I start ranking well (let’s say even in top 20), I alternate between building links to homepage and to T2 pages.

I typically continue to do that and focus then on those T2 pages that still don’t rank that well.

I don’t look at some predetermined percentage, I look at the results.

If my homepage ranks in top 3 for my main keywords, then I don’t need to build links to it anymore.

If I get a chance for a very strong link from an established site I would still probably try and get it to the homepage – just to strengthen the whole site.

But generally I would look at my T2 pages and build links to those which still don’t rank well. I rarely build links to T3 except if those T3 keywords have really good demand (around 1000 based on SBI MKL) and it’s actually worth getting that page higher in the rankings.

So in summary – I don’t have a system of percentages but I build links based on what needs to be done.

If the page (usually T2) doesn’t rank well, I try to get links to it. I still look to get links to the homepage too here and there…

—————————————-

Hi Tomaz,

I just realized that my site is now a PR3! Just wanted to share.

Earlier this year I made some major changes to my site. Instead of focusing on the “keyword”, I now focus only on the “long tail keyword” (a specific model) and I’ve expanded to include “another keyword”.

Over time I expect my site to be only 20% “keyword” and 80% “another keyword”. I was initially concerned that this might be a problem because Google might have trouble figuring out my site concept.

However this is not the case. I’m receiving lots of searches for “another keyword” related keywords. So this seems to be working well.

However, when I made this transition I had to discard almost a 100 pages–55 of my own and 45 C2 pages. The pages are still there but they are accessible only through Google and not through any links on my home page. I also changed my look and feel to use AJ’s 3 column template and I did not migrate any of the pages that I did not want to carry forward.

As a result I have only about 75 pages now. My traffic is stuck around 200 daily unique visitors. (Although yesterday it was 234 so maybe it will start to climb with the improved PR.)

My plan was to keep adding 5 pages a week and spend the rest of my time trying to build links. But is so much link building still necessary if I have a PR3? Perhaps I should be focusing most of my time on adding more content and reduce my link building.

I’ve attached my site’s profile from SEOmoz Linkscape. The item of concern is still the root domains linking since that is still only 23.

In your opinion, where should I be spending my time going forward for the best results?

As always thank you for your advice.

———————-

Hi N.,

The Pagerank is updated almost every day – internally. Google only updates the toolbar version every few months. So your site has had a PR3 for quite some time.

You have lots of links because your site was added to some blogrolls but that’s just one or two domains. You still don’t have links from many domains. (I did a link analysis)

Building links or not building them doesn’t depend on pagerank but on your traffic. If you’re happy with your traffic (and earnings), don’t bother that much.

But if you want more traffic, build more links and content.

Now is especially good time since with PR3 you have some negotiating power – and can get stronger links to your site. Once you get to PR4, you can ask a PR4 site to exchange links with you. The effect will be stronger and stronger.

Realize that it’s quite likely that your Pagerank will drop by the next update and then you’ll lose some negotiating power. So it’s best to “hurry up” now and get into link building before that happens. You need to either secure your PR at 3 or hope to make it to 4.

Build pages too of course but don’t neglect link building. When you have links from 100 domains you’ll have a good authority in the niche but if you saw my post about Struggling With Traffic?, then you know that an average SBI site with lots of traffic gets links from 200 domains.

Most people believe that Google can read their mind.

Well, it cannot; and Google doesn’t think that your page is optimized for the same keyword (s) as YOU think it’s being optimized for.

Most people think the first keyword in their META Keywords tag is the keyword that they are optimizing their article for.

And that adding a few keywords as secondary keywords will help them in some way.

So first, follow the link to see for yourself that Google doesn’t read the meta keywords field.

Whatever you write in there doesn’t matter to Google.

So What Does Matter to Google?

It is the keywords in the title and the link text of incoming links that matter.

Your page is actually optimized for ALL keywords in the title.

The keywords that you use in the title of the page are the main “filter” that will tell Google for which keywords to rank your page.

Other ranking factors will then determine how well that pages ranks against the competition – like link popularity, page rank, website authority, etc.

So the answer to the question whether to optimize the page for “green widget” or for “green widget accessories” is this:

If your title will say: Green Widget Accessories – Coolest Gadgets In Town

Then your article is optimized for:
- Green Widget Accessories – Coolest Gadgets In Town
- Green Widget Accessories – Coolest Gadgets In
- Green Widget Accessories – Coolest Gadgets
- Green Widget Accessories – Coolest
- Green Widget Accessories
- Green Widget
- Green

And it’s also optimized (not perfectly, but still) for:
- Green Widget Accessories – Gadgets In Town
- Green Widget – Coolest Gadgets In Town
- Green Accessories – Coolest Gadgets In Town
- Green Town
- and all the zillion other word combos for every  keyword in that title.

Your article is optimized for ALL these keywords and keyword combos; and Google WILL rank it for all of these searches.

The difference in ranking of course comes from competition!

You’ll probably rank #1 for the keyword search “Green Widget Accessories – Coolest Gadgets In Town”, maybe #5 for “Green Widget Accessories – Coolest Gadgets”, maybe #30 for “Green Widget Accessories” and maybe around 9,876,486 for “Green”. 

If you then get more links to your page (external and / or internal) with the link text that includes “Green Widget Accessories – Coolest Gadgets In Town” and other combos of these keywords, you will start to rank better and better.

Are There Important And Not So Important Keywords In The Title?

One more example to help you understand this:

A lady asked me whether she should optimize the page for “Green Widget” or “Green Widget Accessories.”

I asked her what the title of her article would be if she optimized just for “Green Widget.”

She replied: “Green Widget – Finding The Right Widget For Your PC.”

And if she would have optimized for “Green Widget Accessories” her title would say:

“Green Widget Accessories – Coolest Gadgets In Town”

Her assumption is that Google will know and rank her article optimized for “Green Widget” for that keyword (green widget) and that the rest of the keywords in the title are just some kind of fill – and that Google will disregard those words.

Then her assumption is that if she optimizes for “Green Widget Accessories,” Google will rank her for that keyword (but not Green Widget!) and won’t pay much attention to the rest of the keywords – since Google can read her mind and knows which keyword is really important to the lady and which keywords are not that important to her.

Funny, isn’t it? And yet most of us think that way – at least I did for some time until I figured this out.

The fact is simple: Google ranks your page according to ALL KEYWORDS in the title and doesn’t know which keywords are important to you.

Remember the title: “Green Widget – Finding The Right Widget For Your PC?”

You may think that Google will know and rank you for “Green Widget” but not really for “Finding The Right?”

If you do a search for “Finding The Right” you’ll see that sites rank accordingly to their keywords in the title, link popularity and all other factors that affect the ranking.

No one searches just for “Finding The Right” keyword and yet Google has a ranking for that search and of course for any keyword search you type.

It’s a computer algorithm and not a smart human.

This tells you that Google doesn’t know for which keywords you want to rank. It WILL rank you for ALL keywords in the title.

The competition and links and other factors will then determines how HIGH you will rank.

The Importance Of Keywords In The Title

One more thing: let’s say that you don’t use “Finding The Right” keyword in the title but you use it on the page in content.

Will you rank for this keyword? Yes, but not in the main index. You’ll almost surely be dumped into the secondary index and will never get found for this keyword search.

(See my previous post about the real competition to understand what I mean by main and secondary index.)

If you look at your keyword stats for a page (for which keywords that page was found in the last month for example), you’ll see that almost all searches for which your page was found include one or more keywords that you used in the title.

It is almost impossible to be found for a keyword search when NONE of the searched keywords is in the title!

In other words, your page can only be found for keywords that you used in the title. (Not 100%, but very close.)

This includes correct order of words, inverted order or some keywords missing or added in between.

Example: My page on where to book hotels and flights with PayPal is being found quite often.

Look at the top keywords:

They ALWAYS include a few keywords that were used in the title.

And if I check the keywords that brought just an occasional visitor, you can still see that at least one of the keywords from the title (Book Cheap Flights and Hotels With Paypal) is always used.

That article has quite a lot of other words but it gets found ONLY for keywords when one or more were used in the title!

For example, there’s a sentence with “If you’re travelling in the USA” – but I will NEVER be found for “travelling in the USA” or any other keyword combos.

That’s because I theoretically rank for that keyword search but since none of the keywords is in the title, I probably rank on page 98754.

You can also test this claim by simply doing a search on Google for something; and then checking on which page of results do you see the first site ranked that DOESN’T HAVE AT LEAST ONE KEYWORD in the title.

If I do this for “Finding The Right”, I find the first site without any of the keywords in the title at #48 – and even that site has a keyword “right” in the domain name.

And as you probably know, most of the clicks on search results happen on the first page.

How To Efficiently Optimize Your Articles

The next time you wonder which keyword to optimize for your article, know that in reality you will optimize your article for ALL keywords that are in the title.

Google will not read your mind and know that some are important to you and that some aren’t.

So how can you use this knowledge to your advantage?

Always optimize the page for multiple keywords that you know are being searched.

Optimize for long tail – and you will automatically optimize for “short tail” too.

If you optimize the article for “Green Widget Accessories” (and all these keywords are in the title), you will automatically optimize it for “Green Widget.”

The difference in rankings between “Green Widget Accessories” and “Green Widget” is because of the competition. (there are more pages writing just about green widgets than there are pages writing about green widget accessories!)

You’ll need more links (to the page and / or to the whole website) to rank high for a shorter keyword than you will need for a longer keyword.

And if you cannot decide between two keywords that you’d like to use and are not sure which one is better (Green Widget or Coolest Gadgets), then use BOTH in the title.

Then just make sure that incoming links to that page have these keywords in the link text and you’ll rank better for all keywords that are included in the title and link text.

You can link to the page with “Green Widget – One of The Coolest Gadgets” in the link text and it will help both keywords. Or you can sometimes just link with “Green Widget” and sometimes with “Coolest Gadgets” in the link text.

One more thing: if you look closely at Google’s results, you’ll see that the searched keyword is typically at the beginning of the title for highest ranked sites.

So the keywords near the beginning of the title have more weight than those later in the title.

I’ve experienced a small crisis on my website with Google slashing the PR of site. Until yesterday my homepage had a PR of 4 and most of the other pages had PR 3s and 2s.

Yesterday I tweaked a few things on my homepage and when uploaded through SBI the google PR had been slashed site wide! I’m panicking that maybe I’ve experimented and done too much stuff on my own now, and have done something to piss off the google algorithm.

Now i’m desperately going over all the recent changes I’ve made and trying to work if I can undo it. I was just wondering if you had any advice on this minor catastrophe and if you could offer any other pearls of wisdom on what i’m doing wrong on ________.com.

Thank you for all your advice on your freedomideas.com blog it has been very useful and will continue to be an important resource for me in the future.

————————————–

Google updates Pagerank every few months. So whatever you did yesterday or a few days ago has nothing to do with the PR you see right now.

PR is simply the sum of all links coming to your site. So tweaking your homepage has nothing to do with PR.

It’s just a coincidence. Also, I bet that nothing has changed with your traffic.

PR of your site changed because the PR of incoming links changed. Other websites lost PR and consequently your site lost PR.

But this is out of your control. So no point obsessing about it.

PR doesn’t bring money. Traffic does.

Build page and links – it’s as simple as that. Let the PR do whatever it wants to do.

Here’s a question I got from a friend and I’ll use it as an example to explain a slightly more advanced on-page SEO:

> I’m still learning how to use the brain stormer and figuring out the best pages to write. I would like to write a check list page and want to hear your thoughts about which page is best.
>
>                                                   Supply    Demand    Profitability
>
>
> Free Planner                               1081        567            2332
>
> Wedding Planning Checklist         6069       1136            5342
>
> Free Wedding Checklist                918        59              15559
>
> Free Organizer                            1101       181                6083
>
> The profitability is higher for the Free Wedding Checklist, but is it better to go with the Wedding Planning Checklist because they have a higher supply even though the profitability is less?

The profitability is a waste of time. NEVER look at profitability. This is not financial profitability. It’s just a computer number.

If the demand is not high enough, you won’t get people on your site. Your profitability can be 10000000 but so what if no ones comes to the site!

You need DEMAND. Then you need a  chance to rank well. That’s LOW SUPPLY.

Second, you can optimize pages for MANY keywords, not just one. Google HAS NO IDEA for which keyword you have optimized the page.

You probably think that because you have put your keyword in the meta keywords field, you somehow tell Google to rank your page for that keyword.

Google doesn’t look at keyword meta fields!

It doesn’t matter!

This is ONLY for your Analyze It so that it knows what is the main keyword for the article and then makes sure you include it in all places which ARE important for Google: title, first sentence, in text links, etc.

But Google sees hundreds of keywords on your page and the keywords in your title (you probably use 4 to 8 or something like that).

How does Google decide for WHICH of these hundreds of keywords to rank your page?

MOSTLY by the keywords in the title + the link text of incoming links – which can be external (from other sites) and internal (from your own site).

So you have up to 8 keywords that you can use in the title of your article and it will be “optimized” for ALL these keywords in Google’s eyes as long as you include them in the title of the article and in the link text of the incoming links.

You’ll very likely include those keywords automatically in your article a few times so I wouldn’t really worry about that.

Now – you can use this approach when you have two or three VERY SIMILAR keywords that talk about the same thing – like in the example above. You can optimize the article for most of your keywords.

You DON’T use this strategy for VERY DIFFERENT keywords like – wedding planning checklist and free wedding graphics or something like that.

When you brainstorm your niche you will find hundreds of keywords based on which you’ll write pages. But some are very similar and that where you can optimize your article for most of them and not stay stuck and wonder which one is a better one.

So in your case, you have these keywords:

Free Planner                               1081        567            2332

Wedding Planning Checklist         6069       1136            5342

Free Wedding Checklist                918        59              15559

Free Organizer                            1101       181                6083

And you wonder whether to optimize for Free Wedding Checklist or Wedding Planning Checklist?

BOTH!

Now it also depends whether this is a T2 or a T3 page.

If you can expand it with 5 or more articles, then you can make it a T2 page. In that case, I’d choose Wedding Planning checklist as my primary keyword and optimize the article for it, but would include free wedding checklist in the title and in the text.

Even if you do it like this: Free Wedding Planning Checklist Google can see that the keyword Free Wedding Planning Checklist is in there and you’ll rank well.

But your title can also say: Wedding Planning Checklist – Free Wedding Checklist Ideas

And you now have optimized your article for both keywords!

Sure, I would still suggest you to write a T3 page for Free Wedding Checklist and then link back to your T2 page. It will strengthen both and you might even get a double listing in Google.

As for Free Planer and Free Organizer – these are not really wedding keywords. They can be about business planning. I’d look for wedding keywords since your site is focused on this theme.

You can of course include free planner and free organizer in the article and you may well end up getting some traffic for them.

But back to the topic of this post; you don’t have to EXCLUDE other keywords from an article if you choose to optimize it for one keyword.

On the contrary, you SHOULD optimize your articles for MULTIPLE VERY SIMILAR keywords.

The key are keywords in the title and in the incoming links.

That’s what Google understands and that’s what helps you get ranked higher for a certain keyword and NOT what you put into your meta keywords field.

Press Releases

> What kind of website do they work best for?
Press releases in reality work best for companies that release a new product or a service. These press releases are then picked up by other sites and journalists and that creates a lot of buzz.

For a normal SBI site, the press releases are really not that powerful. All you get in most cases is one link from a trusted site.

> When is it a good time to consider writing one?  If you don’t use them or like the idea of them, why?
> How do you write one?  What information is needed in one to get the best impact?
> Who have you used or recommended?  I have heard of www.prweb.com but would like to know from someone who has used them how they work and if it is worth the investement.

I’ve tried a few press releases in the past when I launched a new website or when I launched a new product but I have seen no real impact from them – not in terms of traffic and not in terms of link effectiveness.

I would much rather get a PR3 link from a related site from within a content and it’s worth 10 times more than a normal press release.

You can find all the important info on press releases in these two articles from SBI Tips HQ:

http://sbitips.sitesell.com/press-release.html

http://sbitips.sitesell.com/press-release-outline.html

Yahoo Directory

> When is a site good enough to consider going into the directory?
I’ve seen pretty crappy sites get accepted into Yahoo directory. I think Yahoo will check mostly that your site is not spammy and they will be happy to take your $299 from your credit card.

> Is it worth spending the $299 to be looked at by them?
In my personal opinion, yes, if you get placed on at least PR2 page. That will give you good link boost and of course you’ll also get many additional links from subdomains of Yahoo directory. Some of these are:

http://uk.dir.yahoo.com/

http://ca.dir.yahoo.com/

http://asia.dir.yahoo.com/

…and others.

I’ve seen some sites which get massive traffic (over 5000 daily visitors) and had just over 200 pages of content and didn’t have that many links. In fact, the most powerful links they got were from Yahoo directory page which had a pagerank 5 and most of the pages of other Yahoo directory subdomains had a pagerank of 4.

So with one single submission to Yahoo, the site got one PR5 link and about 10 PR4 links. If you add just a few of other relatively quality links, you’ll do very well and can practically forget link building.

> Is it true that things happen quicker after you get accepted in the directory?
Again, this depends (in my opinion of course) on the page where you get placed. If you get placed 8 levels deep into Yahoo directory on a PR0 page, it’s almost the same as if nothing happened.

But if you get placed on a PR5 page, your traffic may quadruple in 3 months like in the example I mentioned before. (see image below)

The Effects on Traffic after getting a PR5 link from Yahoo Directory

> Is there a format or sound advice on what they look for in a site that should be done before you submitted your site, so you don’t have to go through a rejection first?
If you’re building a normal site which is not porn or aimed at spamming, you’ll be accepted.

> Should a Press Release or the directory be done first or does it matter?
It doesn’t matter.

Feel free to share your experiences with press releases and whether a link from Yahoo directory made any significant difference to your rankings and traffic!

Well, some of these sites have a fake pagerank displayed. I don’t know how they do it but I do know how to detect fake pagerank sites and stay away from these losers and cheaters.

Here’s an example of an email I got a few days ago:

—————————————
Hi!
Your website  freedomideas.com  is very interesting, and I’d like to know if you’d agree on placing a link to my partner’s website. I’m trying to get links for a business website.

In exchange, I could offer you a link back from http://www.adstro-online . com (Page Rank 4).

If you agree to this exchange, please place a link in your website with the following details:

Title: …

URL: …

Once my link is up, don’t forget to contact me back and send me the information of your site (title and URL) so I can give you the links I promised. Also, let me know if you have more websites, maybe we could do some more exchanges?

Thanks for the attention! Hope to hear back from you!

Link Exchange Team

——————————————————————–

So if you go to adstro online website, you’ll see that it shows a pagerank 4 in your toolbar.

There are a few steps you can take to check if this pagerank is valid or not.

1.    info:www.domain.com in Google – this is usually the only thing you need to do and here’s what you can see in this example:

You can see that you typed in one domain into the search box and Google shows you another domain as the info for that page – the astro-share . com.

Somehow the astro-share site is redirecting the pagerank to the adstro-online site. If you see another domain as the result of the info: query in Google, then something bad is going on.

2.    Link:www.domain.com in Yahoo – see if the site really receives many quality backlinks to deserve the pagerank 4 status. If you’ve ever started a site from scratch, you surely know how much work and backlinks it takes to get the site to PR4.

Holy cow! They got to pagerank 4 without any backlinks! That has to be some pagerank magic or …

… it’s a fake pagerank.

Wherever there is money, there are cheaters. Stay away from those and let karma take care of them…

How?

Well, I am not the originator of this idea so I’ll just link to this excellent link building article where everything is explained.

By the way, there’s one comment below the article that I want to quote here:

Melanie Nathan said:

“I suspect that most people will be too lazy to put in the work of doing the research and contacting each site though. That’s good. Their loss = our gain.”

I agree 100%.

I also keep in mind a short sentence from a very successful person (forgot who it was):

Do It Now.

Update: I followed my own advice and started emailing people when I found out another tip: once you identify the geocities page to which a site links, run a backlink report from Yahoo on that geocities page to find out other websites still linking to it.

I’ve been now actively involved with Internet marketing for 4 years and want to share my findings related to Pagerank – as I disagree that Pagerank is dead.

My findings are not based on a scientific study but on experience and I don’t claim that they are the unviversal truth about Pagerank. But there is some hard logic behind my ideas so I invite you to check them out.

Here’s why Pagerank is not dead yet:

Google says:

PageRank Technology: PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

In plain English this means: Pages with higher Pagerank are more likely to appear at the top of the search results. This is especially important to note for those SEO geniuses who like to show examples of how their low pagerank page beats a higher pagerank page.

Yes, there are exceptions but the probability is NOT on your side. Google says »likely« and not »always«.

So what you’re doing with your example is showing the »unlikely« event and I definitely won’t base my link building strategies and success of my site on »unlikely« examples.

Feel free to follow the »unlikely« path though – a few less competitors for me in the long run.

And based on my experience and every day Googling on various topics, I almost always see high PR pages and website ranked higher than lower PR pages and websites.

Not always but “almost always”. Guess which path is the smarter one…

PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value.

Plain English: A link from a higher PR page will be more beneficial than a link from  a low PR page.

Therefore, I look to get links from high pagerank sites and pages as they are more beneficial. I will continue to do so until Google removes their claim and until I see no difference between high and low PR incoming links. Right now, I still see huge difference.

A PR5 link pointed to a site with lots of content (100 pages or so) and very few links, can quadruple the site’s traffic in a couple of months.

The Effect Of A PR5 Link - Very Few Pages Were Added From July To October

Why the exceptions? Why are sometimes low PR sites ranked higher than high PR sites?

From my experience, in order for Pagerank to really do its magic, it must be COMBINED with 3 other factors:

1.    Main keyword in the title – A low PR page can beat a higher PR page if the low PR page has the main keyword in the title and the high PR page doesn’t. If the high PR page added the main keyword in the title, it would most likely outrank the low PR page!

2.    Main keyword in the anchor text of incoming links – Similary, a low PR page can beat a higher PR page if the low PR page has the main keyword in the link text of the incoming links and the high PR page doesn’t. A high PR page has big advantage though; if it just gets a few anchor text links including the right link text (main keyword), it will very soon outrank the low PR page.

3.    Theme of the website – A low PR page can beat a higher PR page if the low PR page is on a website that is themed around tightly related keywords to the main keyword. Google says:

We also analyze the content of neighboring web pages to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user’s query.

Therefore if other pages of your site talk about similar topic, you’ll have better chances of ranking high.

This is where a high PR website cannot do much – except gain even more links to it to gain the »monster authority« status.

Typical examples of »monster authority« status in Google’s eyes are Wikipedia and Ezinearticles. They can outrank themed high PR sites even though their theme is spread among huge diversity of topics.

Note that in most cases (ALL from my experience), they have the main keyword in title and they have lots of internal links with that keyword in the link text!

So in order for Pagerank to work its magic, you need to:

-    Include the main keyword in the title
-    Include the main keyword in the link text of incoming links (external and internal!)
-    Build your site around a theme

If you do that, the probability of a lower PR page ranking higher than your page is microscopingly small.

So is Pagerank dead yet? Far from it:

PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms.

You just need to know what part of the recipe for high rankings the PR  has. If you exclude Pagerank from the recipe, it’s very likely that your »cake won’t taste really sweet.«

Update: Matt Cutts in this video mentions pagerank as the key to why some pages rank higher than other. Is pagerank really dead?