Next, Page Rank will Cure Cancer
I cannot believe so many people still give so much weight to Toolbar Page Rank (TRP). Come on people catch up to the rest of us and realize that TPR is not the end all be all of Search Engine Marketing. I am blown away with how often I still see applications or marketing programs based on TPR.
Here’s one that just made me laugh out loud. All the SEOs I showed it too laughed as well…
A hosting company, www.sultanhost.com is currently running a promotion offering Free Hosting to sites with a PR of 5 or better. Seriously, here’s the page http://www.sultanhost.com/freehosting.html
The higher the PR is the better hosting program gets. Of course there is a catch, you must place a link back to the host on EVERY PAGE OF THE SITE. Does anyone else see a problem with this? I can tell you I have seen sites penalized for aggressive linking doing less aggressive tactics than this. These guys seem to know just enough about SEO to get their asses handed to them.
Ok … I can see some non-search related benefit to this tactic, but if you want links like that, please don’t base the program on a useless metric like PR and if you do, use No-follows. For those who think I am full of it and that tactic is cool, here’s are the main reasons it is not…
- Run of site links are just plain dangerous
- They are all using the same link text
- All the links are probably on the same IP block because they are all hosted at the same place
- Potentially 1000s of links showing up at the same time
- All the above = a ranking penalty
The odds are, by trying a slick PR based promotion these guys are probably making things worse than ever. Page Rank trickery is not going to fix your web ranking problems magically. You need real naturally generated links cultivated by great content. This is so basic, you need to get it or let someone who does smack you.
And if you ask me, Social Media is going to cure cancer, not PR.
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I analyze many websites. This idea to link back to free hosting I have not found yet, but it is unbelievable how many companies for webdesign link back from their customers pages to their own website. If you check backlinks of webdesign companies almost all of their backlinks and PR is made by footer-links from customers websites. Some websites I found do that on any single page. And I bet on it that almost all of the customers are not aware of the fact that they are supporting those webdesign companies for free though they have paid them a lot for design and will not get any amount for those backlinks. Google should stop that.