How Do You Categorize the
Value of a Backlink?
Backlinks have different 'scores', but all of your backlinks count for every webpage that Google has indexed where a backlink (to you) exists. The best way to see your whole 'backlink report' at any time, for any website you have access to, is to log into your Google WebMasters account (again, it's free and easy to set up). When a website designer adds his clickable link in the footer of a client's webpage, it counts. Even though the website designer's website probably has nothing to do with the client's website. When a visitor tracking code snippet that you add to your webpages has a hidden link that points back at the visitor tracking website, that link counts, even though the visitor tracking website probably has nothing to do with yours. Google expects the whole internet to offer other things... and measures the popularity of websites 'offered' by the backlinks found on any webpage of any website. And it adds all of those links up for every webpage Google allows/indexes. This is because a person can only see one webpage at a time (not a whole website at once). So on whatever page they are looking at, they will probably click a link... maybe yours, if it exists on that page. This is why every webpage of every website actually does count.
Some folks wonder whether backlinks from websites that do not have related content can count, but that question stems from a whole different issue: link farms and other websites that Google does NOT authorize... again, the way to know what Google authorizes is to do a search for a specific website (even a specific webpage where your backlink does or would exist) to see if Google indexes it. If Google said 'yes' to the webpage (meaning that you can see it appear in the results), then the webpage is legitimate, especially if it has existed in the system for at least 2-3 months. That means backlinks to you from those pages will count.
There are tons of websites with tons of pages that folks confuse with spam... but Google has indexed the majority of those webpages on those websites for months to years. That means they are not link farms or 'fake' AdSense sites (and there are very large, legitimate, AdSense sites) or doing anything which triggers a bot to mark it 'bad.' In our case, we produce extremely large websites on full-automatic all the time, and the record number of webpages that Google ACCEPTED OVERNIGHT is 9,980 (over 1/2 year ago, and those pages still exist). If every one of those webpages has a backlink to you... it counts as 9,980 backlinks to your website, and that alone - overnight - can turn a PR0 into a PR1, and possibly even a PR2 (though you will likely need at least one other website with at least one backlink to you, for a PR2 rank. At least that last piece of work is simple, now... go add your website to some page on some other website, like in a directory -- when Google indexes that page again, and sees your link, there you have it). Remember that simply having a link on the main page of 2 different websites are not enough for a PR2 ranking, but should at least get you a PR1... especially if the links are on higher-level webpages of those websites (the pages sharing the most linkjuice).
Only Google knows exactly how much weight comes from a given backlink, but the model is relatively basic. There are a lot of resources out there which helps you understand how it all works (one of our favorites is this PageRank Calculator). This is generally the bottom line:
Let's say you have a PR-0, and you want to have a PR1. Using 1.00 as the concept, we realize we need to 'acquire' a total of at least 1.00 in "link juice" (not an official term, but is commonly used). So, if we get a total of 1.00 in linkjuice (which always comes from backlinks) to the home page of our website, then it will have a PR1 score. That's the goal. Note that Google only updates the 'publicly displayed score' which all tools on the internet read from once every 3 months or so. That's the 'publicly displayed' score... again, your real PR updates in real time -- as Google discovers backlinks leading to you by indexing new webpages with links to you, and re-caching webpages it already approved, which now contain links to you.
A webpage with a higher PR ranking gives your backlink more 'weight', and a backlink from a true PR4 webpage alone can just about get you a PR1 score... but this does not mean that 4 such backlinks get you a PR4 score. Again, the scale is logarithmic, so you would need perhaps 100 such backlinks to get a PR3 score... if you are one of 100 websites that this page links to, outside of itself. In this case, we could call the value of each backlink a '.035', meaning that 100 such backlinks get you into PR3 territory. Clearly, you have to find each such webpage... see if you can get a link on it... perhaps you even have to create an account to do it... then type something up that will work, submit it, and hope the website owner approves.
And even if you did all that work - it can takes weeks - there is still a big problem. Your link won't be the last to get added to those pages:
Everyone searches for high-PR webpages, to stick a link on, pointing back to their own website (hence the phrase, 'backlink'). The problem is that whatever public webpages you find to stick a backlink on yourself, others follow. Linkjuice is split (generally evenly) across all those backlinks... it doesn't end with your entry on that webpage. Others follow, add their backlinks, and that draws down your PR score. This is often why folks work hard, all the time, trying to follow popular leads from popular software, forums, and directories to high-PR public webpages to add their links, and even after doing this for several weeks, they never seem to get out of the PR1 or PR2 territory.
The answer, simply, is that the value of the backlinks they keep getting, DECAYS, behind them, over the following days, as new folks add new backlinks. This also explains a lot of what folks refer to as the 'Google Dance', which is when ranking results seem to shift -- even several times daily -- on certain keywords: mainly, folks still add more backlinks, and at the same time, Google is reassessing their old ones and recalculating them, page by page, all across the 'net. Since Google gets to higher PR sites a lot more often than lower PR sites, those higher PR sites are visited often... and this is why websites keep getting 're-ordered' en masse on quality keywords. That's why this approach is often touted as very important (and it's better than nothing... the concept is generally correct)... but the results are just not that hot: you get a surge of rank, then it dies. Then you get another surge, then it dies... so if that sounds familiar, you probably found yourself in this predicament at one time or another.
So let's take a look at something else...
something we can control, and add to as we go along.
Since most of us don't own many webpages with high PR, we don't have any that we can control. We could rent or trade for placement on other webpages with high PR, but the website owner still has final control over those webpages (and trying to get a PR3 that way could be quite costly, if you want the website owner to not allow other new backlinks: just ONE would HALVE the value of linkjuice you get from that link. And if you quit that website, you have to find another deal to replace it.
It is therefore far preferable to maintain your own way to generate backlinks that you CAN control... even if you have to resort to generating a LOT of webpages that link to you, with small amounts of linkjuice, each. Simply put, if you can generate webpages that Google will at least index, then you can ADD to your PageRank over years, without the risk of "decaying linkjuice." You get to keep what you build up, and add more value that will also not decay, over time.
