Thanks for your blog post.

btw, if you are interested in checking out our backlink tool for beta testing purposes, more info is here http://www.attributor.com/link_building_beta

Page Rank has been a beautiful project at the time when has been created…lately became just another manipulative tool. You should know how many people manipulate PR…also I’m sure you know that Google manipulates PR as well. I’ve seen a website which used to be PR6 with lots of PR inner pages. It has been stripped of PR on all pages apart from the index.php page. How would you explain that index.php has PR6 while all the other pages have PR0? I also know an old, well established web directory which used to be PR5…now it’s PR0 on the homepage while many inner pages are PR2 or PR3.

Both of the examples above are still doing fine in SERPS so we can’t talk about any penalty…it’s just a manual PR downgrade.

Don’t worry about PR that much – better work on rankings and traffic. Any page that is indexed is a good place to link to if you get the chance, no matter if it’s PR0 or PR8…

The best way to request links is still via email. Usually most of the serious webmasters will keep the links in place there are only a few kids or silly people that would remove them. Personally I won’t worry that much and I won’t waste my time chasing this kind of people. I would rather preffer to have only 5 quality sites linking back to my site than 75 low quality resources.

Hope this helps

Great advice. A couple of questions – should there be a page rank minimum that you should pursue or is it really any link (without nofollow?) as you say above.

Also, how would you recommend asking for links when someone is re-using your post or site content without linking back? We’re soliciting beta testers for a free product that identifies links for you and points you towards email to request the links. They can be customized, but email seems a little tenuous. What do you think?

Rich