First, a short résumé on what page rank is. Google has a formula based upon links to and from other web pages, both internally between page sin your own website, and externally, between your web pages and those of other websites. The more links back from other web pages to a page on your own website, the higher page you get. The more links away from pages on your website to other web pages, the lower page rank that page gets. It is therefore a balancing act.

The reason for this is that Google decided that the more web pages linking to yours, then the more relevant your page must be to the search term (keyword) concerned. Your page must be important for other pages to be linked to it. This is fine as far as that definition goes, but once webmasters understood this, they began to link with each other until, we have a situation today whereby these links are automatically created by means of software, and the content of the linked pages is irrelevant.

However, until Google tackles this problem, right now the Google formula applies irrespective of the relevance of each linking web page. Some web pages can get listed on Google and other search engines with very little content, and only a large number of links. I have seen examples, and many forum postings on this, but whenever I investigate these sites they appear to be listed only for fairly obscure keywords that are not popularly used.

My opinion is that on-site SEO is very important, but when sites are equally optimized, then the links from other sites become relevant. There is probably a part of the search engine algorithm that includes an element of back-link density in the primary calculation, but I do not believe that onsite SEO is less important than link density.

My reasons for this belief are the results that I can get with my websites/pages with maximum onsite search engine optimization as far as I know how to do it, in relation to those web pages that I have not optimized, but added lots of links to. The optimized pages always do better that the sites with only back-links.

Page Rank Refers to Pages not Websites

Keep in mind that it is only web PAGES that Page Rank and ‘link density’ applies to, and not the whole website. Hence, if you are linked to a page on a website, the home page of which has a PR of 8, this figure ‘8’ is irrelevant to your share of the PR of the page you are linked to. Most pages have a PR of ZERO, and that is the benefit you get. Zero!

Therefore, when linking to other websites, check out the Page Rank of the page on which your link appears. That is the ranking of you receive a share. Not the home page of the site. Some webmasters will try to con you and state that “because you are linking to high PR website, the link you provide should be on your Home Page”. That is because a Home Page is normally ranked higher because it is the page that most people optimize as much as they can. It is normally the Home Page that is first listed in Google and Yahoo, and is listed the highest.