There's lots of talk about pagerank not being as important as it used to when ranking your pages in Google. People are saying there is more emphasis now being placed on the anchor text of inbound links.
I have thought this for a while... and I believe that link exchanges are extremely important now regardless of the pagerank of each site (well.. dont exchange with people below PR3). Not any old link exchange, but link exchanges with TOPIC-RELATED sites.
I'm in the process of developing MotorcycleClothing.com and will spend lots of time developing link exchanges. Link exchanges with motorcycle/auto sites ONLY. This isn't for the pagerank necessarily, it's for the recorded PR3+ inbound link that says 'Motorcycle Clothing.com' from other MOTORCYCLE sites.
What am i getting at? I think 10 links from motorcycle sites that are each PR4 is worth more than 1 link from a generic PR7.
What's funny about this 'strategy' is that its the way things are supposed to be done. Motorcycle sites should exchange links with motorcycle sites. Not travel, casino, or blogs. I'm not saying you can't exchange links with travel sites, but.... you won't get as much of a bonus.
I think this info plays into the 'over optimization' theory. People thought they were getting penalized for over optimizing. I believe these people just didn't have enough topic-related inbound links.
This also makes sense with the comments of how much more important major directory inclusions are... like Yahoo and DMOZ. Well, with the theories above... being listed in the official Google directory would be HUGELY important. Not only would you get lots of pagerank, but a guarenteed topic-related link.
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