My Brokerage Shakes Me Down For Link Love

Well it’s not quite that nasty, but it certainly feels a little uneasy on my end of the deal. I usually get 3–4 requests a week for trading links and I routinely decline them all.

Today I get a quite nice, and generally friendly request from my brokerage to use certain keywords and links to the brokerage website from my home page and certain other pages on my blog and static pages. I truly don’t think they are trying to be bastards about this. I suspect it was just realized “hey we have some bloggers and individual websites in the brokerage, maybe they could all link to us and we wouldn’t have to do anything in way of providing content to plump up our page rank”.

Here’s the rub though. The Brokerage main site is Page Rank 5. My blogsite is Page Rank 5. As far as Google cares… we’re equals.

If I’m being asked to add a direct link to the brokerage on my home page, wouldn’t the quid pro quo be that the brokerage adds a direct link to me on it’s home page?

The other thought is making me giggle. I could completely comply with every demand to use the brokerage name as keywords. Heck I could add it to every page a couple times. Just tossing it in the footer and header would do the trick. By this time next year I’ll likely have a solid Page Rank of 6. Which would possibly mean that I would rank higher in search results than the brokerage website for vanilla searches on the name of the brokerage itself.

Another random thought. My own brokerage is ranked as the 14^th largest brokerage in sales figures nationally. Shouldn’t they just be a little freaked out that little ol’ me is viewed as an equal in the eyes of Google?

And finally…

Sheesh, caring about page rank? Isn’t 2006 over?