Back in June when I first started learning about Google, and PR, and linking, many people believed that one should not link to a PR0 site because it could be penalized, and that one should seek out backlinks from sites / pages with high PR.

As of a week ago, while some still held onto these old beliefs, most of the people who seemed knowledgeable to me were advising that PR was essentially irrelevant and that one should look for backlinks from sites / pages that meet the following criteria:

1) Index page cached
2) Relevant site
3) Relevant links page
4) Static links page
5) Unframed links page
6) Links page within two clicks of the index page
7) 50 or fewer links on the links page
8) Site is not part of a links farm and does not have an automated links page generator.

And just a clarification for anyone trying to learn from this thread, rather than just trying to educate me, in place of “relevant” I could have used the word “themed.” For my site, real estate, skiing, and the area I live in are all central themes to my site. So a link from a Viagra sales site / Viagra sales themed link page would not do me much good. Neither would a link on my site / link pages do them much good.

So anyway, now that there has been a PR update, should I begin to avoid linking to PR0 sites and focus on trying to get back links from high PR pages that also meet the above 8 criteria? Or should I continue to ignore PR and just keep doing what I have been doing, which by the way seems to be working? And finally, is there anything wrong with or missing from the above 8 criteria that I should know about?

Thanks Everyone!

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Sincerely,

Ted Amenta
Breckneridge Real Estate Agent
For Breckenridge Real Estate in Breckenridge Colorado visit www.amenta.com.

Ted, funny you should post this as I was just replying to a PM here about this exact thing.

You should go on doing thing as you have been since the middle of June. I for instance traded about 20 links on this site this morning from PR4 pages on my site to many sites where the link back to me is on a page that is not even cached yet. I am confident that those pages will be crawled soon and my link will be seen.

PR is a guage to show how many sites point to a particular page. I use it as a guage to tell me how frequently I can expect Gbot to visit a particular page. I don't think people should really use it for much else.

As for your theming ideas. I don't think Google or anyone else for that matter themes an entire site. I do think (and for people reading this, this is my opinion...not absolute fact) that Google and others can figure the theme of an individual page. If the anchor text of the link matches the page it is on that will help the page it is on and the page it links to. If the page being linked to matches the anchor text of the link and the theme of the page it is being linked from, that is even better.

I think your list has some good things to think about when searching for a link partner. But, some of them I do not think belong there. And, just because you don't find someone that can fulfill all of those criteria, doesn't mean you should not trade links with them.

My 2 cents.

Hello Ted,
In regards to linking to a PR0 page the idea was to avoid linking to pages that had been penalized.

I felt it was a generalization for those who didn't know how or didn't take the time to check out the sites/pages they were linking to.

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Sales Training ~ Mobile Homes For Sale in Arizona ~ Arizona Manufactured Housing

I agree with Chachi, some of your items might not belong there.

Here is list of basics I had posted on this subject.

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Sales Training ~ Mobile Homes For Sale in Arizona ~ Arizona Manufactured Housing