Claim: Exchanging links with pages or sites that have a lower Google pagerank than yours will hurt your
positioning.
Status: False
This is like "marrying beneath your station" I suppose. It is frowned upon in the best SEO circles. There are some
Search Engine Optimization "gurus" who insist that you should never exchange links with sites that have a lower pagerank
than yours, as that would hurt your ranking. I know this is not true from experience, since I have supported higher
ranking sites with links from my own lower ranking ones and vv. It is hard to imagine the rationale that would cause
search engines to calculate positioning in this way. Refusing links to lower ranking sites also seems to be morally
obnoxious. If everyone did that consistently, a new Web site could almost never get any external links! Of course, you
should not exchange links with pages that have been banned or are obviously exploitation Web sites. Other than that,
logic tells us this dictum has to be false and so does experience, except possibly for the case of direct competitors.
It might be false, strangely enough even if you are exchanging links with a competitor. Let's say you have the Acme
Widgets site with Pagerank 4, and your competitor has the Best Widgets site with Pagerank 3. In Google, Acme is
positioned fourth and Best Widgets is positioned fifth. Perhaps (very doubtful) Best Widgets will gain enough from your
link to overtake you because you gave more than you got. More likely you will both gain from the exchange, and with
enough such links you would both move above the # 3 site. Consider the alternative. Remember that Pagerank changes over
time, especially for new sites. You refuse to link to Best widgets. But Best Widgets gets a lot of links anyhow. They
might eventually get pagerank 5 or 6.
Remember also that the Pagerank number is the rounded value of a log scale number. If you have Pagerank 6 and only
exchange links with a Pagerank 6 Web or above Web site, you still don't know if the other site has real Pagerank 6.5 and
you have real pagerank 7.49 or vice versa. The difference between 6.5 and 7.49 is of course much greater in a log scale
than the difference between 5.49 and 6.4 for example, yet 5.49 and 6.4 are respectively show as "5" and "6" - different
pageranks, while 6.5 and 7.49 are both shown as "Pagerank 7"
Two other considerations show that the idea is very dubious indeed. The first is the rank of the link page versus
that of the main page. One is that most sites do not link from their main pages, but rather from back pages. The link
page of a high ranking site may itself have a pagerank of only 1 or 2. Is it still more valuable than a front page link
from a site that has a pagerank of 4 for the main page? The second is the number of links in the page linking to you.
The "authority" given by a link is supposedly a function of the pagerank of that page, divided by the number of links on
that page. It may be better to get a link from a page with rank 3 that has only two links on it, than it is to get a
link from a page with rank 4 that has 200 links on it.
