Do you use use the Google Toolbars PareRank meter as a way of determining the ‘value’ of a link? Well it may be that you’re missing a trick or two when discounting Grey Bar’d (perceived) PageRankless pages as a source of links.
For those of you who don’t know, I’ll recap a standard policy on Link Building. Building effective links falls into 3(ish) camps with a combination of all 3 needed to give you a well rounded, Google proof organic backlink profile. These are:
- Authority – sites that are trusted sources of information
- Juice – sites that pass PageRank (not green bar)
- Relevancy – links that are wholly relevant to your niche
Add to this list that links to your site should have a nice keyword rich anchor text and you’ve got the cornerstones of a highly effective campaign.
It’s rare for one site to deliver a link that achieves all three (unless your competitors start linking to you) and within boundaries where anchor text is king, it is important to make sure that many of your terms are linked using one of the 1000s of keywords you’re firing at your site.
In the quest to build great anchor text rich links many people qualify pages on a wide variety of measurements including SEOMoz’s Domain Authority, Number of inbound links from unique domains, domain age and the ubiquitus PageRank however it is Anchor Text where the real power lies.
For example. I currently market a furniture site that is doing really well for its main two word terms but we would like to attract more traffic from fuzzy searches where people don’t know the type of product we well whilst targeting terms that accurately target our niche i.e. Vintage, Antique, Period etc. To achieve this with maximum effectiveness and minimum outlay we have decided to use Directory submissions as a way of quickly building a back-link pool of targeted terms (you could use social media, articles or micro-sites if you are prepared to spend more time) but with so many low quality directories out there and PageRank disappearing straight off the home page how are we to determine effectiveness?
As an experiment I decided to use Googles Cache date as a measure of whether Google is actually visiting the internal Directory pages, on sites where the site is listed and the cache date is under 45 days I requested a link.
The net result is that our site is gradually improving in ranking for these fuzzy prefix and suffix terms. Agreed its only a start, but Ii think that when you’re trying to deliver maximum benefit for minimum cost that tactics like these when properly monitored and controlled can deliver great results.
If a solid grey bar means the page has not been ranked and the white bar means your page has been ranked, then are you screwed if Google has ranked your page and found it to be worth nothing?
The Google Toolbar in general is 50% make believe. what’s more important for low level link building is to ensure your link additions are indexed and the relationship visible to Google.
Seriously, this method has helped us rank for off-shoot terms on the chesterfield sofa site.