Ted Ives recently authored an article entitled “What is a Link Really Worth? Part 1: Valuing PageRank” that was published on Search Engine Land, a go-to reference point for online marketers.

Everyone would agree that links are an important ranking factor in SEO.  And typically, inbound links from sites with a higher pagerank (PR) are assumed to be worth more than those from sites with a lower PR.  But by how much?

Ted notes that Toolbar PageRank is a logarithmic measurement and previous research suggests that each incremental PR level is worth 5.5 times the previous level (e.g. a link from a PR6 site is worth 5.5 PR5 links.

He then conducts a study of his own to measure the correlation between a site’s PR and the number of inbound links.  His results are quite remarkable and should help any SEO value the amount of effort required to obtain a link at different levels of Toolbar PageRank.

For a more thorough overview of the value of inbound links and a complete explanation of Ted’s research on the topic, make sure to check out his article on Search Engine Land.

Tags | link building, link valuation, linking, PageRank