Danger in high PR links?

I have been studying the strategies of James Martell recently (you all know that several of his high profile sites were banned from Google a couple of months ago).

The banned sites do not look as if they are going to be let back into Google any time soon, so I wondered if there were any other clues as to why his sites were banned, or just perhaps pointers we can all learn from. For those of you who subscribe to Martell's Buzz newsletter (and I highly recommend it), you will know that Martell made his own suggestions of why his sites were dropped. However, his explanation just does not cut the mustard.

My initial thoughts (as my newsletter subscribers may remember) were that he linked to PR Zero'd sites as link partners. That is, his links page pointed to several sites that themselves had been banned or penalised. This is something that can get your own site penalised. However, the penalty is not usually as harsh as the one Martell received.

Thinking about this, I took another look at Martell's handbook and found another possible problem. Google does not like artificial PR manipulation as it makes a mockery of the "vision" that was PR. Any site that can be seen to be manipulating PR to a high degree might well find themselves under the Google Microscope.

Owners of Martell's handbook will know Martell's criteria for including link partners (hint: PR). Could this be a reason for the penalty?

Google originally wanted the PR of a site to be built out of natural linking, i.e. one site would link to another because it was a good site, and would provide relevant information to its own visitors. In this natural linking model, good sites would receive links from sites with a range of PR from 0 up to the higher PR values.

This is what you would expect if linking was natural.

Don't you think that a site with link partners of PR 4 and above only would look kind of "unnatural" to Google?

My own strategy has always been to start off with low PR links and then go after higher PR links (but still keeping the low PR links) once my own links page gets some PR. In doing things this way, linking appears much more natural.

On my own sites, I am concentrating more on non-reciprocal links. i.e. sites link to mine, but I don't link back. This is the most difficult type of link to get, but by writing and submitting articles to article sites and newsletter authors, you can get a larger number of non-reciprocal links in a relatively short space of time.

Subscribers to my newsletter can get a fr.ee "Article report" that can help you with this if you are unsure or nervous about writing your own articles. Why not give it a go?

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Andy Williams is author of the free, ezSEO internet marketing newsletter, offering subscribers up-to-date information on all aspects of internet marketing and search engine optimization.
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