How to Estimate How Many Links You Need

Doing some work for a client with a fairly new site recently, I noticed their home page has a toolbar PageRank of 7, and they achieved that almost entirely by having a site-wide link on a PageRank 9 website.  Finally, now that have I seen enough cases like this, I think it’s possible to estimate the answer to the question “How many links do I need?” for many situations.  This posting will detail the anecdotal data I’ve seen, and then give tables that can be used to estimate what a page’s toolbar PageRank will become if you obtain a link from a high-PageRank site, and also how many links of which type you need to move up one level of PageRank.

Why Getting a PR8 Site-wide Link is Like Getting a Single PR9 Link

You’ve probably noticed that if you have a PageRank 6 website, the next level of pages down on the site are probably PageRank 5, and the next level down from that are PageRank 4, and so on.  This is not always the case (for instance, one popular post on this blog titled “Google’s Secret Ranking Algorithm Exposed” is a PageRank 4 as of this writing, while the blog’s home page is a PageRank 3) but it’s generally the case.   So when you obtain a site-wide link from a PR6 website, you’re essentially obtaining one PR6 link, maybe 10 or 11 PR5 links, and 50 PR4 links (perhaps).

If each level is worth roughly 1/5 of the previous, then a site-wide PR6 link is equivalent to:

1 PR6 link (the home page) + 10 2nd-level PR5 links (=2 PR6) + 50 third-level PR4 links (= 10PR5 = 2 PR6) = 5 PR6 Links = 1 PR7 link.

Looking at the anecdotal cases, it does seem to me that obtaining a site-wide link is akin to obtaining a home page link from a site that is one PageRank level higher.

The Value, in PageRank, of Obtaining a Single Link

Clearly, that depends on your existing PageRank, and how much PageRank you will get from the target of a linking request.  Using the anecdotal evidence above, I created the following table and calibrated it against those individual situations; you can look up what your pages existing toolbar PageRank is, and then look over and see what the pages PageRank should be after obtaining a link from various other pages.

How Many Links You Need to Move Up One PageRank Level

Remember, in the article referenced above, the conclusion was that each toolbar PageRank level is roughly 5.14 times harder to reach.

Based on that assumption, and the table above, I generated Table 2, which does not show how many links it will take to go from zero links, but instead, how many links will it take you to *move up* one PageRank level.