Permanent high PR poker links are rare enough, even if you don’t get into philosophical questions like, “Is anything really permanent?” In this post, I’m going to look at the subject from both a philosophical and a practical perspective. I’ll also try to keep the observation content of this article high while keeping the advice content low. (I give too much advice anyway. I’m just another webmaster with an opinion, and you’d be wise to remember that no matter which one of my posts you’re reading.)
Permanent Links
From a philosophical perspective, no links are permanent. Eventually a website is going to change. The owner will die, or she’ll sell the site, or something will happen which will cause your permanent link to become temporary. I like to think of permanence as it relates to links on a sliding scale. Imagine a line, and at one end of the line, your link is going to be live for no time at all. A little to the right of that, the link will be live for one second. A little further to the right, the link will be live for a minute. Then a day, a week, a month, a year, several years, etc. On the far right will be the often coveted “permanent link” which will be live forever.
When thinking about links to your site, it’s helpful to think about where on this line they’re going to fall. If you’re buying poker links, then most of the time they’re going to fall farther on the left side of that continuum than on the right side of the continuum. In fact, most webmasters don’t buy or sell links anyway. They rent them. It’s an important distinction that few webmasters take the time to observe.
What kinds of links fall farther to the right on the permanence continuum? Links from friends are more likely to last a long time than links from strangers. Links from sites which have been live for a long time already are probably going to be live longer than links from sites which are new. (Everything else being equal, an older site will be live longer than a newer site. The owner has already shown commitment by being live for five years instead of for five days.) Links from sites with lots of pages will probably be live longer than links from sites with few pages. A webmaster who’s built 400 pages of content on a site is less likely to shut down a site than a webmaster who has built 4 pages of content.
High PR Links
Lots of people say, “PR doesn’t matter.” But everything else being equal, I’d rather have a high PR link than a low PR link. PR stands for PageRank, and it’s part of the Google algorithm. There’s some debate about how much of a role it plays in the ranking algorithm, but high PR sites get crawled more often and are more likely to be found in main results rather than in the supplemental index. It’s important to understand that toolbar PR isn’t indicative of a page’s actual PR, and Google purposely obscures some pages’ PR values for the sole of intention of cutting the rug out from under the link buying and selling economy.
I don’t worry or stress out about PR when I build links. But am I aware of it? Do I think it matters?
You bet I do.
Poker Links
Someone started spreading a myth about on-topic links a while back, so you’ll occasionally find poker webmasters who don’t want links to their sites from other sites that aren’t about poker. My experience has been that a good link from a good page counts, regardless of whether or not the page that’s linking to me is about a poker related subject. My friend Jim Bob might run the world’s most successful cigar review site and have no interest in poker, but he might like and respect me enough to link to my poker site. I’m not going to turn down his link offer because his site is about cigars and not poker. And I’m not going to refuse to link back to him because of a fear of reciprocal linking penalties either. Or because his site isn’t about poker. Websites and pages can and should discuss multiple subjects.
In fact, if I limit my link building to the “usual suspects”, poker sites which link to other poker sites, then I’ll never be able to get a competitive advantage over the other people in the business. I want links from sites where other people can’t get links, or at least where they might have trouble getting links. I want a unique, diverse backlink profile. That means I’d like to pick up links from Scotty’s site about scotch reviews, and from Jim Bob’s site about cigar reviews, and from Anthony’s site about sushi bars.
Do I want permanent high PR poker links? Sure, I do. So do most poker webmasters.
But lots of poker webmasters mean lots of different things when they talk about “permanent high PR poker links.” What do you mean when you talk about such links?
As a follow up to this article I’d love to hear your thoughts and how to quantify the worth of a page without looking at toolbar PR.