High PR backlinks work but not all high PR backlinks services work the same.
Usually when we think of high PR backlinks we think of Home Page Backlinks services, AKA HPBLs…
UPDATE TO POST:
buying pr backlinks = in vast majority of cases, high pr backlinks services and offerings for placement of your url on domains that possess the pr but not placing your backlinks on urls with high pr, (big, all the difference there)
For those who don’t know what HPBLs, they’re basically a slew of sites with PR, hopefully “good PR”, not “ready to be downgraded at any second PR” sites, and the goal of these sites, networks and services is to boost the “luv” and authority to the linked-to sites, to give high PR backlinks of VALUE and to give rankings boosts…
There’s also high PR backlinks services that deliver high PR backlinks via commenting and temporary links placements on sites, in some cases even directory submissions.
The issue with these types of high Page Rank services isn’t whether or not they’ll deliver the promised backlinks for you (they’ll be going out of business rather quickly if they don’t), but rather, the quality of the service, the inherent value of the high PR backlinks, once delivered, placed and accredited to your destination sites.
OBLs, outbound links- Some people opine that OBLs don’t matter, but the services I’ve tested revealed to me that less is more, so the less OBLs the better, at least from my personal experience with the 4-5 high PR /HBLs backlinks services I’ve tried, and am still using.
Page Rank quality- You can buy sites with Page Rank from auctions and set up your own network of High PR sites, but the danger here is that once ownership, WhoIs records, and even hosting providers changes, you could see a Page Rank drop. But there’s also the concern that when using a HPBLs service that they’ll be susceptible to this kind of thing too, therefore you’re putting faith in in their handling of and maintenance of those sites’ PR. Even if they DO maintain the PR, the sites quality might be junk.
Link givers’ site quality and history – how long has the site been in good standing, has domain ownership or hosting been transferred recently, therefore due for a drop or re assessment any time soon?
***Yes, I know these things can be guarded against using multiple hosting providers, different IP addresses, private registrations, etc..just saying that there’s a lot of little details that go into doing this correctly, and safely***
IBLs- InBound Links to the sites in this network (applicable to HPBLs).
- Where are these sites getting their IBLs from, if any?
- Are these sites, networks getting the high PR backlinks, if any, from the rest of their network? (look for an eventual mass de-indexation at some point)
- Are these networks getting IBLs from other varied sources like any good trust worthy site would?
In my humble opinion, it’s the IBLs that matter most, because it stands to reason that good quality links and/or link juice to these sites means they’ll maintain their high PR backlink-giving capabilities. You need to have link juice in order to give link juice, yes?
** Disclosure: I don’t have my own network of high PR sites used for link juice passage. My opinion is limited to buying a few domains, and like an seo noob, doing dumb things with them that made their PR drop almost instantly, but I do use/rent these services out from time to time to ascertain what kind of effects they have, and what sites respond best to them (older, aged site respond best and make it to top 5 easier than newer sites)***
But WTF, aren’t we tired of talking about Page Rank, PR, getting high PR backlinks etc…? (apparently not)
Where’s the value to a high PR backlink, really? Well, it’s not really from PR “passage” but rather trust passage, that’s it, that’s all, nothing more. A site with PR is a site deemed trustworthy according to a search engine spider ‘s PR calculation, therefore PR backlinks are tantamount to passing of trust, and trust begets solid backlinks, which begets better rankings.
***You can get trust from a merit-based, editorial backlink, too, even if it’s not from a relevant site, of course an editorially given, merit-based natural backlink from a Relevant site would be best****
How to get High Page Rank Backlinks
There’s a ton of manual ways to do this and they’re slow and laborious
Link exchanges- Site owner A has a PR 2 url they’d put your backlink on, and you would link to one of their other sites using specified anchor text form one of your sites. Sometimes they’ll even ask you to provide an article, which they then add to their url’s existing content.
Blogroll exchanges, directory submissions, footer links, themes and templates sponsorships, - all self explanatory here I hope…
Guest blogging – Write a good article for a top quality site and hope that someday your article get a PR bump (but where’s the link luv and link juice?)
Blog commenting - find the high PR urls with comments open, see what you can get from this type of usually high OBLs link…
Testimonials- usually a low OBLs count here, just don’t sell your testes for a “testie” backlink
Where and when to use HIGH PR backlinks services?
If you have a good budget for SEO and you want to get to a top 3 position, sometimes it’s necessary to use a service that gives high pr backlinks… temporarily or otherwise…
You can only add so much content to your site and eventually have to stop optimizing your site to fit well with what search engines expect a site about X to look like,
… and you can’t fake a site’s “age”, therefore getting paid-for high PR backlinks is a decent alternative.
***Another alternative would be to pay for banner advertising on relevant sites to bring in some targeted traffic, as opposed to spending a recurring fee on high PR backlinks that might not bring in an influx of visitors right away****
After the on page optimization is done, and you’ve blasted out articles, and all sorts of links and link wheels and supernets and mini nets and ultimate link wheels and so on and so forth… your site might still be a PR2 trying to outrank a PR 6 site, and while I’ve seen plenty of PR2s outranking PR 6 sites or PR 6 urls, it’s usually only because the PR 6 url is an inner url on an authority site, and/or that authority site isn’t even really trying to rank for that term.
On the other hand, if your competition has a PR 6 site, and they’ve optimized their site url for the same terms… then you’re faced with the scenario whereby you need to have equal, then better links if you hope to surpass the competition (there’s other ways to outrank the competition without getting equal, then more backlinks but that’s an SEO course unto itself, and eventually whatever was done to make that site rank over the competition will raise its PR anyway).
Page Rank isn’t the issue here though, that’s a point some people seem to miss with all the attention being given to PR numbers and PR-ed links and what-not. It’s more of a trust-passing issue than anything else. PR is given-eth and PR can be taken-eth away 
, and while I’ve had sites gain PR 2 on inner urls, they’re rankings slipped, despite a PR bump.
Confused yet? Good, because that’s how SEOs make money, they don’t share the secrets, they just do what works, and are on the lookout for what’s stopped working, then they/we/you? move on to the next things that are working.
High Page Rank backlinks still work (at the time of this writing) depending on:
- the site being linked to (new site, crap site, old site, penalized site? etc…)
- the kind of juice the networks have ((links in (IBLs) and out (OBLs) to the sites in network))
- multiple other factors, one of which is, whether or not the sites have “junk PR”
Suggestions- when employing high PR backlinks services don’t stop your other link building efforts.
If you want to test this kind of thing out, go for a sub-main-keyword at first, to game the test in your favor (you might want to read the post on smarter link building for a tip on how to do this)
Or you might want to dedicate the high PR backlinks for the main domain url main keyword, or keywords… and spend time link building for the inner content pages of this same site. The reason for this suggestion has to do with link velocity… if your link velocity was 50 new backlinks a month, then you cease and desist with those efforts due to a hopeful reliance upon the high PR backlinks, then link velocity gets switched up a bit, the pace has been altered, the link sources have been altered, and while this isn’t a major thing to be worried about, it can’t hurt to push some link juice towards your inner content pages instead, and then push some of THAT newly gained, or additionally gained link juice from those inner content pages to the main url. you might want to read the post on how to maximize on page optimization factors for more deets on throwing your on-site seo weight around).
Example: I had a domain in Linx Boss for 6 months and the domain wasn’t keyword rich for the extremely competitive keyword it was trying to rank for. LB got it to Page 4 for longest time, and was stabilized on page 4 for a while.
Then I re-optimized the home page, paid some close attention to keyword density and other factors, made the home page of that blog a dedicated static page, then put to work a new high PR backlinks service I’m testing.
After I got the high PR backlinks service going, I switched out the keywords LinxBoss was getting me anchor text links (tags, still!? 
) over to the sub-main keywords for that main domain url.
This kept the velocity pretty much the same, excluding the new backlinks from aforementioned new service, and since it’s the only url on that site that’s getting regular new backlinks, it’s not that much of a “shock” to the site because the same url is receiving new IBLs activity, velocity.
****Page 2 for that term now, but it’s only been a week so I’m still not super-excited about the test, specially seeing as how the service costs 200/month and I’m not monetizing this test site in any professional manner****
Recommended High PR Backlinks services: I came up with something that makes good long-term business sense regarding high PR backliks
{ 48 comments… read them below or add one }
Awesome Post Dan!
And I agree especially with LOW OBL’s and the IBL’s Activity.
Velocity is something people don’t really think about so I’m glad you pointed that out.
It’s a HUGE risk to be involved with any High PR “membership” out there right now. So many network building wannabee’s just purchasing high PR’s but not taking into consideration all of the other technical aspects of building a healthy and diversified network that is built for long term stability.
Cheers!
Thanks Josh, good to see you on here too. Some of the HPBLs are OK though, but it’s the BFSOs and WSOs ones that get people with crap sites to join them, and as the old-school SEOs say, ” A good site doesn’t often link out towards bad ones”, which means that whatever sites these OBLs are pointing out to can adversely affect the networks giving the links.
i think high PR backlinks services, whether they’re HPBLs or not, should have a site approval process before they accept sites into their network, but that’s just me
Thanks,
Dan
What “techincal aspects” are you speaking of? More than mentioned by Dan? Can you give an example of a network that does a good job of it and an example of a network that does a bad job of the other technical aspects? I am really interested to hear you opinion.
I’m not a network techy guy by no means, but there are some basics when building a network that a lot of these fly by night companies miss the boat on.
Here’s just some food for thought: Dan can correct me if I’m a bit off here.
1. The traffic to the site before the time of purchase.
2. The market which it was purchased in, i.e., Chinese domains are no good for SEO
3. Age of the domain (minimum 2yrs).
4. Yahoo/DMOZ listed.
5. Structure of the site – how it’s setup, plugins, bookmarking, FB pages per domain, unique themes.
6. What kind of content is on the network. Is it scraped, spun crap garbage, etc…
7. Other basics that Dan mentioned.
I agree mostly with your 7 points, though directory listed doesn’t mean much, and a foreign domain could be good if it naturally received tons of traffic from people in the states. For example there are soccer teams in Mexico, South America, and Europe that gets lots of traffic for people in the US and they are still valid sites for US traffic. Another thing to look at is the traffic the sites are getting as part of the network. Also, I would look at if the network is constantly expanding, amount of posts to a site is can set off red flags to Google.
I like the way you explain what PR really is…not “page rank” but rather “trust passage.” I have a health blog that got PR1 with no backlinks whatsoever and only updated once in a blue moon. But even though it’s trusted its still buried deep in the SERPs. I wonder what your opinion is about trust passage from subdomains or inner URLs of high PR sites to the sites you are linking to? And will a high PR link pass trust even if it’s no-follow?
Thanks for keeping up this invaluable resource!
PR links, whether NoFollow or DoFollow will pass trust or just PR itself, in the end it’s one trusted site linking to another. Page Rank all by itself doesn’t guarantee high rankings. I have a whole slew of Panda-lized sites with Pr1s and 2s, it means nothing really.
On a side note, a penalized site does NOT pass a penalty towards a site it might be 301 redirecting to…something to think about…
Thanks for your comment and questions,
Dan
Thanks Michael, good to see you here.
I’m “done” with SEO debates, like the one about low OBLs versus high OBLS not making a difference, since it leads people down the road of more attention to minutiae and less attention and focus towards experimentation and self-knowledge.
Thanks,
Dan
The best networks of any kind, will have rules about the links they accept, and should also be picky about the customers they allow into their network.
1) Do your onsite optimization,
2) Creating content is important, and being consistent with your content creatoin is important.
3) Back links are important whether it is do-follow or no-follow, but so is website mentions. One of the owners of ArticleSearchEnginemarketing.com use to own a business financial site, he was interviewed by Fox Business and that interview was put into an article. Though no “link” was recieved the mention of the website has recieved a lot of “love” by Google. To this day, when we do a search on that site, the article is always on page one.
4) How long people are on your site matters a lot
5) Click thru rate matters a lot
6) Where the consumer exits matters.
Hi Daniel,
Glad to see updates here.
In view of recent G’s algo updates and their concentration on social media signals as well as crowd signals (bounce rate etc) – do you think *links* are STILL THAT valuable to get well-positioned and have steady ranking in G’s SERP?
And 1 more, time ago you said your EMD micro-niche blogs BIZ faced kind of fiasko due to panda. Did they recover yet/any changes?
Thanks.
Hi Paul, thanks for checking back.
Google algos change frequently yes, and a lot of noise was made about social signals, and I looked into that at yes it can play a factor, but nothing beats good backlinks. The EMDs never recovered, so I use them for tests with BING SERPs, read the Linkumate review if you like.
Thanks,
Dan
So, seems like things you did with those EMDs aren’t deemmed a good practice *any more*… But that was mostly linking isn’t it? So, linking is good and linking is bad
Well, thanks, that’s something to think about.
I don’t think it’s ever a good practice to build a mini-site in one day, rank it in 3 weeks using xrumer links, then throwing just Adsense ads on it.
Worked great for a while, if there were Chitika ads on there I think Google still would have bounced the sites down, but having Adsense on these sites almost guaranteed the smack down.
If the sites were better, and updated more frequently, then maybe they’d still be making me 330/day…
Live and learn
Oh, you did it that way…
I thought you had outsourced content and used your best-recomended services… Do you think this way they would survive it?
FYI you guys, EMD and minisites still work extremely well. Check out adsenseflipper.com and you’ll know, they have no problem with google. I still have plenty of my minisites doing good and unaffected by google.
Can you tell me if you are building profile links, article directory links, or blog comments to your test blog?
Hi Jack all I did was use some of these high PR backlinks, and kept linxboss running on it to maintain the velocity of links inbound to the site
Thanks,
Dan
I’m also testing out actuallyrank.com for some quality blog commenting links. They use their own scoring system of 1-100 to value a link and PR. I got myself the smallest package, the 2000 links, and seeing if they’re worth the time and effort. So far, not to happy about the current month’s batch. Lots of dead/broken/non-english and ‘too old to make a comment’ sites so far.
Anyone hit by the latest update? I had a 6 year old site with hundreds of pages of unique content that just got blasted. Google’s gone mad! They obviously don’t know what they want.
I honestly don’t touch these “homepage backlink” networks with a 12 foot pole. Your building your site foundation on sand, honestly. I used to sign up for all of them I could find, 1.5 years later – guess how many of those networks are still standing today? Not very many. A huge time and money sink for very little gain. My results may not coincide with some here, but it’s my personal opinion that any HPBL network, no matter how good they are build (and most of them aren’t built very well mind you), have their days numbered.
What I’ve been doing recently is going through some personal domain brokers and places like TLA. Your up-front costs are a lot more, but if you do your research you can get your links placed on some amazingly powerful and high authority site by simply paying the monthly fee. You have to do a little research as well, making sure your link doesn’t look paid, but that’s a whole different can of worms – and is mostly common sense stuff anyway.
Up-front costs are a lot higher, but time saved is immense, you don’t have to worry about Google shutting down X network – and headaches down the road is next to nill.
Just my 2 cents.
Great points here Adam, and so true. HPLS are getting shut down left and right because of a lot of factors, with the main one being the owners are running cash-cow services and aren’t protecting their investments properly. Postlinks is a good service that does what you’re suggesting, there are others, too. What works now for HPBLs is private, better-maintained networks. I’ve joined some real crappy ones and was amazed at how shoddy they were run…
This is why I decided to create something that was indeed a bit different, as I have a partner who has been running high pr networks for years, hasn’t had ANY discovered, shut down, devalued etc…. Your option for renting high link juice links is a good idea, it’s still a rented non-earned link so to speak… 6 of one half a dozen of the other, I guess.
In your case, renting links is safer because if they don’t provide continued value, then you just go find another rental. If you had your own private network built properly and maintained properly, then you wouldn’t be renting, but still gaming the system.
Thanks for the feedback and comment Adam,
Dan
Hey guys,
A lot of these high pr networks do a lot of “rights” when it comes to having diversity in i.p.’s, servers, hosting, privacy, etc…
But then they totally blow it and their network sucks because of two really important and highly overlooked things:
1. Crap Content (either spun, or scraped) on the network.
2. Too high on the OBL levels.
That’s my two cents!
These high pr networks are like Dan said, they are cash cow services and so you pay for what you get.
If I could voice my opinion, about 97% of them… They suck beans!
Roger that Josh…
And there’s plenty of anecdotal high profile evidence about sites getting banned and slapped from renting links, too, but in those cases the links were quite obviously paid/rental links
JC Penney for example, they haven’t recovered yet (jewelry, home decor, skinny jeans serps are still AWOL)
Overstock allegedly got hit too but I see them as page 1 for jewelry, but not for other terms they got their serps dumped for, although they are still getting some Google love (type in vacuum cleaners and you’ll see what I mean in Related searches for vacuum cleaners:…).
If HPBLs didn’t work for you it’s either the hpbls service, or the competition that’s making things not work, if that’s the case for anyone who has used these services before.
It’s common practice in the ultra-competitive seo circles to report your competitions’ link farms to Google, so…sometimes some of the OFF site stuff your comp does affects you too.
Josh, I’m gonna report you to tha Big G so I can get ahead of you on page 1…wink wink…
Ha ha, yes, I’m partially ahead of you (depending on which keywords) today but what about tomorrow after you report me you sly dog! He he, he he.
Just remember it’s me that’s commenting on YOUR blog! And me that’s been following YOU!
LOL!
I should keep more stuff myself then… btw if you choose one of “our” keywords if/when you join the Private high pr network, there’s an exclusivity feature there whereby we don’t allow your competitors to try and rank for same kws
Is it possible that BMR links could hurt my site? I have a site that is aged, tons of links, etc… and google has killed it. Use to be number one, now 19. Great unique content, etc…
Don’t know why it got hit.
High PR networks like BMR are the best, it’s just most use spun content, I wouldn’t even consider that now. It needs to be unique and possible LSI, a speaking out to readers, even some BMR writers are just totally crap with their search engine fodder.
The only thing better than this? high PR blog comments. I keep a list of over 200 high pr aa sites, even some .edu pr 7 and I got a pr 8 link the other day with about 6 OBL
The only problem with this is sometimes it can be over done, being impatient that’s why I like BMR, it really does kick arse but then again i’ve never seen a site move so fasy up the serps with a pr 8 link
BMR absolutly owned for me In a not compettive niche, along with social net work integration. I think too many people look for an easy “solution”. gotta diversify people! Using mini-nets are fine, and somewhat helpful as long as they are used with a real marketing strategy other than just SEO.
Hey Dan,
Would like to suggest that you review socailadr.com whenever you get a chance.
I used it for 3 months did the linkaholic service level and it didn’t do much for me, re-reviewing Synnd now as it had good PERMANENT results for some keywords tested
Hey Dan. Good stuff. I personally like Private Networks. Not a fan of monthly recurring, but have a few that are worth it. Some in the 39-59/mo range for 30-70 PR2-PR6 domains. I feel that’s pretty well worth it. And of course I’m hitting the site with a lot of other contextual links as well and I’m getting pretty solid results.
Btw, good to see you’re still active. Hit me up sometime!
Chris
Hey Chris, thanks for the comment, I’ll hit you up on Skype soon,
Dan
This is an unrelated comment. But I wondered if you’d be willing to review http://revseo.com
Hey Kelly Marsh,
I may be speaking for Dan here, (which Dan correct me if I’m wrong) but he has used the service before. And when we talked about it, it’s on the top of my list to use for “diversity” link-building. By diversity, I mean it’s good for some diversity, and helps with the social ranking factors for all 3 major SE’s , but really just helps with B&Y.
So that’s that. Hope that helps.
Hey Chris, yes I used it before and it didn’t do much except get urls indexed
Dan,
You say…
“and they’ve either gone over to not doing Adsense at all”
…I have experienced a massive drop in adsense earning on a couple of my high ranking sites. Now…I will say, for whatever reason, google has dinged these sites, so my rankings are not quite as high, but I wanted to find out why the experts are “not doing adsense” and what alternative we have with those sites?
Thanks,
Mike
I should try to writer better
With Adsense, you’re better off producing voluminous amount of content because it’s a content publishing model not a ranking mini-site EMDs model if the niches are fairly competitive. I have serveral micronichefinder sites that are EMDs, about 1k exact searches/month with little to no competition and those are doing OK, but with Adsense in competitive niches and keywords, it seems like you have to be THE authority in that niche in order to rank totally 100% whitehat naturally.
Otherwise a search team can take a look at your site, it’s backlink profile, and since backlink self-generation is a GAMING of the system, their rankings system, you’re susceptible to a drop at any time.
…and with Adsense you have Google’s cod eon your site, you’re giving Big Brother almost the same info that you would if you had Google Analytics on there. I have nothing but anecdotal “evidence” to prove that these two things help with big G some insight into your sites that you might not want them to have.
I was wondering about that, as I have my own “mini network” of niche related sites that I link to (and from). Hmmm??? Recently google has killed my rankings on a couple of these sites, therefore, I’m sure the reason my adsense on those sites are way down
Thanks for sharing very useful information. Is there any way to get pr 3 travel links ?
Thanks Paul for this post. I think you need some of each way of link building : forum posts, link exchange, post articles and get some good links from directories and a decent domain will get your rankings up anytime. I would not spend my last dollar on a p a i d link if you can write more content yourself.
Just my 2c
Rick
Rick, good point but reality is… one paid and rented PR 6 link will give you more juice than 1k PR 0 links, and yes it’s a rented link, but it saves time and you either pay with time or writing spinning and submitting for those 1k or so Pr 0 links that might some day get decent PR.
Thanks,
Dan
Informative post.
Another way to build quality backlink is from site that already listed on DMOZ, am I correct? Very hard to get listed on DMOZ now.
Yea, DMOZ might be going bye-bye someday soon. Easiest way to get a DMOZ backlinks is to buy a site that’s DMOZ listed and 301 redirect the domain that’s DMOZ-listed to whatever domain you want a DMOZ quality link to
Merry Christmas,
Dan
Okay their are lots of guys i saw on fiverr selling High PR sites links for $5 only, if they are any good? if someone tried those guys
I’ve done many different fiverr gigs, bought them I mean… 1/ did well, it all depends on what you order, high PR links aren’t recommended by me, by them though…they’re mostly high OBLs comment spam links via scrapebox
I started off using the recommended services (at the time) for these sites, but it got laborious trying to write, spin and submit articles to get to top 3, so I employed some other services I wanted to test, to see if they did any good.
I would have been much better off building out those sites with more content, less ads, a newsletter optin, and giving the sites a “personality”. The links that stuck were from the good services used, the sites got whacked due to their poor quality and MFA-ness…
Most Adsense pros say to build out real sites and to use multiple monetization methods on site, not just the MfAs, several well-known bloggers experience this same kind of hit, and they’ve either gone over to not doing Adsense at all, using other contextual ads services, or just focusing more on the affiliate side of things.
I think we’re straying from the point of this post though, and while I’m happy to answer your questions, I don’t want any future readers of these comments to get side-tracked from the point of this article.
To get this back on topic Paul, let me ask you this: assuming you’re someone who doesn’t know how or just doesn’t want to build a high PR backlinks network, what would be the best way for you to enjoy the benefits of such a service whilst also having your own network built for you?
**This question applies to any and all readers of this comments section, not just you Paul****
Thanks,
Dan
Well, not you got it right, I dont wanna use this kind of network.
Let’s suppose I do want, here’s the calc: I make a site with … a hundred of posts, each needs 5 links (average), that means 500 links. Coming from 1-2-3 sam c-class IP. If I have more posts – more those links.
I think it’s kind of risky to use mini-nets wheter they are high-PR or not. You spend a lot while exposing yourself to a risk of being penalized.
The sad thing is there are no real alternatives, the more I think of it the more it is clear that we are being G-forced to behave naturally, not in SEO-style.
Sorry if that’s opposing to the idea of your post.
Paul, thanks for the reply. And no worries about differing viewpoints and beliefs.
I see it working and working well and I have no issues with that. Real-life proof of stuff that’s working today trumps any “beliefs” anyone else might have, at least for me.
This post shared some results from something I tested and I’m not selling anything (yet
).
You can try and get the merit-based, editorial high pr or high link juice or high relevancy links if you want, but high pr backlinks services like this are shortcuts that sometimes work and sometimes do not work.
Thanks,
Dan