Rejection hurts … especially if it’s not warranted. I received another rejection from a highly relevant site who informed me in no uncertain terms that he only exchanges links with sites that hold a PR of 5 or higher. My site just wasn’t good enough ….. or was it??
I took this rejection notice personally, so I decided to educate anyone reading with the following information.
What is PageRank? Page Rank is a formula that Google developed to qualify a website. To assign a number between 1 and 10 by gathering about a hundred factors or criteria, analyzing the site with these factors and then determining a ranking. The higher the PageRank, the more Google feels the site will be helpful to you.
Considering PageRank is a part of Google’s ultimate ranking algorithm, you would think that the sites on page 1 for any given keyword would all be high PageRank sites. Not so.
I took a keyword off the top of my head — well, ok, it was off of the last client I was working on — LANYARDS.
The number one site — look at that, it’s ours! — has a PR of 4. The breakdown of the top 10 sites was as follows:
7 sites with a PR of 4, 1 site with a PR of 3 and 2 sites with a PR of 5. Nothing higher than 5, yet Google found them relevant enough to highly rank them.
My point is simply this – if the site inquiring about a reciprocal link has a low PR – it is not necessary to send out an immediate rejection. Take a look at the content first – if it is relevant, I recommend linking to it no matter what the PR is.
