I've been looking over the reports that my virtual assistant has been giving me every week, and I saw something a bit fishy. In the report, she has included a lot of information, including the location of the link and the page rank of the site the link was placed on. Let me explain: as you probably know, the higher the page rank, the better the link is (see my article on link juice). As with many things, quantity is not as good as quality. In other words, if I got 2000 links pointing to my site that all have a page rank of "0", that's still a fair amount of "link juice". However, if I had just 4 links from a page rank 10 site, that would be equal to or even worth more than the 2000 page rank 0 sites. Pretty impressive, right?

Well, my VA (virtual assistant) has been placing links on sites that have a page rank of anywhere between 1 and 4. I'd love some page rank 4 links, but it doesn't look like that's what's happening. She's apparently putting the links on internal pages within these websites that are actually much lower in page rank. Basically, the top-level domain (the home page) is a page rank 4 but the interior pages within the site itself can vary greatly depending on their specific relevance and traffic. What this means is that the page rank 4 sites that the links are on are actually page rank 0 or 1 depending on the specific page within the website they are on. As an SEO expert, I thought this a bit fishy. To be honest, I did have that "a ha!" moment when I thought I'd caught a scam being played out before my very eyes.

The plot thickens...

It's sometimes hard for us SEO's to accurately guess the effect of links and page ranking. The algorithms are simply not made available to us. We can only make an educated guess based on our experience how these things will work out. In this case, I knew that at least some page rank from the top-level domain would transfer through the links on the interior pages, but I didn't think it would be that much. In my own mind, I have given a lot of weight to the specific pages that a link is placed on. Apparently, the top level domain's page rank matters more than I thought. Link juice did in fact transfer through the links, giving them more weight and authority. I knew this would happen, however I did not know how much it would affect links on interior pages.

I underestimated the effect of the entire domain's page rank. I suppose it is best to view the top-level domain's page rank as a "grade" of the site as a whole rather than just the rank of the home page itself. So, I've learned something very important and vital to link building.
 

The results so far

The best thing about being wrong is when you get positive results that you didn't expect. The site in question has gone from position 50+ to position 14 in Google in just a few short weeks. I couldn't have asked for a better results in such a short time. The only two questions I have now are:

1) Are these results long-term or short-term?

2) Will these results continue to improve?

Only time will tell I suppose. As usual, I'll let you know as soon as I do. Thanks for reading, and don't hesitate to comment or ask a question!