Oct 16 2008
Are You A Stingy Link Lover?
When you give a “link love” to a web page, it means you put up a link from your web page to that web page. It is often unsolicited, that means the other web page owner does not ask for the link. But you want to link because it may be so interesting, funny, admirable, funky, useful, informative or worthy of your link love.
According to common understanding (or misunderstanding?), when you link out to another web page, you are giving them a “vote” on its importance. Google will treat your link to the page as a backlink, therefore ranking that page higher in its search result pages.
Furthermore, when you link out to another page, according to the common (mis)understanding of the Google PageRank formula, you can be losing “importance” for yourself, and so your link love makes you less important, and so lower ranking in Google search result.
This is not to mention that, when you link out to another page, you can drive visitors away from your web site to those page, therefore reducing traffic on your web site.
Therefore, many site owners or bloggers are very careful in linking to others. Reciprocal linking (both pages agree to link to each other)? Maybe. One way linking? By default no!
But have we understood it correctly? After reading directly from the source in the official Google webmaster central blog, it seems that it really does not matter whether we should be generous or stingy in our link love or not.
What really matters is that we link to only web pages whose content are relevant to ours. This can make our site even more “important” in our subject matter. But we need to avoid linking to web pages with irrelevant content, “spammy” pages which exist only to increase their search ranking, and “bad neighborhood” which is a collection of web sites which scheme to increase ranking of one another.
By the way, I wonder if “link love” is an appropriate term or not. True love to someone, as I was taught, is something we give out unselfishly, even if the other person does not deserve it. It is a mercy and grace. It is not about what we can get in return.
So are you a generous link lover or a stingy link lover? As for me, I’m learning to be generous one. I will link to you if you are good and relevant, whether you ask for it or not. And as a site owner, my job is not to beg for links, but to develop really good content so that others will “love” me more 
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ya, what i found in Google’s pages is pagerank is only 1 out of 20++ criteria in the ranking. In fact, i found that also many websites with low ranking (PR:0 or 1) show up in first query page. So it probably depends on the user’s query.
I am not too sure yet how important SEO is, at least, among ppl that i know doing some SEO job, their websites not even have PR>=5, which i still think SEO expert can do such magical job? correct me if I am wrong. :p
I have a fren’s website, few years unmaintained (if not wrong, > 3 years), http://www.8stand.com, when i visited, it shows a PR=3, and i ask my fren how he do it, he said…”i dun know… i long time no maintain the website already.”
is google will gradually increase your ranking? And SEO’s job is actually speed up the process, no such high PR magical job?
My site at http://nextlevel.com.my is almost on auto pilot mode but yet still maintains PR3, though dropped from PR4 years ago.
Frankly, I’m very cautious towards those who claim they can raise your ranking, yet when you check on them, like you said, they are not ranked very well.
Imagine if you are so good in search marketing, why not use the skills to promote your site, sell your products and earn your own good money? Do you really need to earn piece meal income by doing the jobs for others?
Yes I think a site’s ranking will get better gradually if it keeps on generating good content. But all other things remain equal, no I don’t think Google will increase a web site’s ranking gradually. Competition is there and getting more and more fierce.
I suppose as site owners, we should learn to do SEO ourselves as per Google’s guidelines at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?hl=en&answer=35769. It’s not difficult anyway. I think the site owners are the ones who really have the heart for improving their own sites, not third-party outsource provider.
But for businesses and site owners who don’t want to know even the SEO basics, then I guess SEO experts can play a role here. Better than nothing
By the way, I can’t access 8stand.com, redirected to OpenDNS…
yes, i agree with what you said. we need SEO, but not the type that is overclaim by those experts.
not too sure why 8stand.com can’t access, it was a ringtone download website.
if you can check at prchecker.info, it still rank at PR3.
Hey Guys don’t overstress about Google PageRank – first off what you seen in the toolbars that report PR is not the real PageRank that Google uses in its ranking algorithm, but a squashed up version that bears little resemblance to the real thing.
Then again PR is really not at all important when it comes to ranking, as many pages with low (or even no) PR still rank well.
Beware of following Google’s guidelines blindly, they only tell you what they want you to know, and usually its not even 5% of the whole story. After all Googles Job is to provide information by ranking pages and if they tell everyone how they do it they will be out of business next week.
As far as SEO improving your rankings and site traffic, if you go to someone who knows their business yes they can get your site ranking up at the top, but the problem is that there are too many scammers out there who will promise you the moon and use your hard earned money that you paid them to live the high life.