Link strategy question

[rob]

Obviously getting your links added to relevant, higher ranking sites is ideal.

Here is the question.

Gumtree has a good ranking but does that mean if you post in the relevant section of their site and include your link it would be worthwhile? e.g. you are an estate agent and post adverts for your properties on gumtree in the properties section, including a link to your own site. Does that follow the pattern Google want?

[James]

Good question. Here is my opinion:

You are right that a valuable link is one that is:

a) from a relevant site
b) from a high page ranked site

a) The relevance. I assume that Google categorises all sites. So to my mind, Gumtree would be categorised as "classified ads". So a link to an "estate agent" is not a match. Of course, it's possible that the property sales part of Gumtree is categorised as "estate agent" which would support your theory.

b) Page Rank. Gumtree homepage is PR6, so if you could get a link on the homepage then great. However, individual adverts are PR0, so surely a link from an advert is virtually worthless in this respect. It's interesting that Gumtree allow you to put hyperlinks in adverts, I'm surprised there's not more spam on there.

I imagine that Google is wise to this sort of thing. Any website where another site owner can post a link to their own site probably has even less relevance. eg forums, blog comments, classified ads.

As a case study, I recently posted a link on freedigitalphotos.net homepage to tiltshiftphotography. The sites are in the same category (photography) and FDP is PR6. tiltshiftphotography went straight to the first page of google, even though it is a brand new site. So this proves the theory of relevance and page rank.

[David]

I think James is right and the important point about PageRank is the value of the page on which the link appears and not the site homepage. I imagine that Google engineers it in such a way that the internal pages of sites like Gumtree have a low rank, despite the rank of the homepage.

[Tom]

You also need to watch out for the No Follow tag (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nofollow ). Wiki now use it for all their external links, so you get no page rank benefit from a Wiki link.