Here is the catch....
When a site provides a link to yours, search engines like Yahoo pretty much just count it as a backlink. However, Google is believed to be a little more sophisticated. The consensus within the SEO community is that Google checks the relevancy of the page the link appears on (in this case - the PR5 site) and compares it to the relevancy of your site. If Google can correlate keywords like travel and Hawaii between the two sites, then you'd receive the full benefit of having an inbound "relevant" link which would pass some of that extra authority associated with the PR5 on to you. However, if there is no relevancy and Google figures that out, most likely it just won't be counted. If Google believes it to be a "paid link" you might even be penalized.
What you really need are links from authoritative travel oriented blogs, travel agencies and those kind of websites. If these sites have a section devoted to Hawaii and it directly links to your site - then you will likely gain the full benefit. From the user standpoint, this is really the most desired scenario, Why settle for just an unused link for a little authority when you could be getting links with both authority and the potential to drive some traffic that are interested in your niche. (I know - easier said than done.) I guess my point is to try and find relevant sites to link to and worry less about their PR.
For example, inbound links from 4 lower PR rated sites that are travel related will score you more points than 1 unrelated link from a high PR site in most cases. Well, that is the theory anyways though I'm not sure anyone has solid proof because relevancy is a difficult thing to determine through mathematics but most believe Google is taking a stab at it.
Mike
Quote:
Originally Posted by puahawaii
i still have to build strong incoming links for the blog. finally i found a 5/10 PR blog - but not travel or vacation related!! - which is willing to trade links with me but blog owner mentioned that she heard that google penalyses exchanges between non-content related blogs?  |