With your brand new, professional looking website up and ready for the masses, using link exchanges can be a powerful way to drive high quality traffic to your website and provide useful content for your readers. Unfortunately, having a newly built website creates a number of hurdles you must cross before reciprocal linking becomes an easier process. Learn to spot these roadblocks up front and you will break through the PR 0 barriers.



Why do I have a PR of 0?

Google Page Rank (PR) is given to websites approximately once every quarter to determine their level of importance on a scale of 1-10. Many factors determine PR, most of which Google keeps very secret. It is during this time when Google has yet to rank your website that you will show a PR of 0 in the Foxfire Google toolbar.

Why Does a PR of 0 Matter?

One aspect of backlinking to websites that greatly affects your PR is the quality of the pages you are linked to. For instance: linking your car parts website to ten dog grooming websites will not give your PR much of a boost due to lack of relevance, but if you link to several websites that are also automobile related, it will send your PR in the right direction.

Many webmasters look at the requesting website's PR before they will complete a link exchange fearing that a low PR will bring their website page rank down. Though this is not really the case, it is a hurdle you must cross.

What to do about it?

Unfortunately, the PR of 0 will not change until Google updates their page ranks, but you can push through the next few months by doing the following:

1.Run the numbers. There are several tools available to help lessen the burden of manually searching for link partners. I suggest using one of these to help find a large pool to start from. Set a goal to send a determined number of link requests each day. I generally look for 50 matches, sort quickly by web title for relevance and apply to the link exchange forms that match my content. Even if you only get one response a day, you are still building quality reciprocal links.

Note: If you see they have a PR restriction, honor it and put them in a category for the future.

2.Build relationships. If you know a Webmaster with a site relevant to yours, send a personal note requesting a link exchange. Many website owners are willing to help out if they know the quality of the site.

3.Build one-way links by sending out articles, posting in newsgroups or by building a profile on high traffic sites such as MySpace. Commenting in newsgroups or on high traffic sites and adding a comment about your website in your signature file (making sure the link is active) gives you backlinks to your website from those pages.

Having an initial PR of 0 is a reality all new webmasters must face, but if you forge ahead, building a high quality link exchange network, you will be pleasantly surprised when Google makes it's page rank updates. Don't be discouraged and don't give up. Soon you will be in a position to easily gain reciprocal links to other websites with content your readers will value. This will give you both a steady stream of targeted traffic from your partner sites, and a high quality, content rich website as well.