Link Juice Vs. Page Rank

[SEODinosaur]

What is better from an SEO point of view a Page with Page Rank of 5 with 0 clicks linking to your site or a page with a Page Rank of 3 with 1000 clicks linking back to your site?

Is link juice important? do search engines count Link Juice?

[KTaylor]

Will you clarify what "clicks" you are referring to?

[Naghirniac]

In my experience, the link juice is one of the most important parts of SEO. I had a new website, structured and with good content. It only get well for the keywords when I started to have backlinks.

So, in my experience, links are very important.

[SEODinosaur]

I am referring to a link that you build externally, and the amount of traffic that funnels thru to your site. My question is is it relevant to SEO does it help my rankings?

[SEODinosaur]

I understand that link building is very important my question is:

"What is better from an SEO point of view a Page with Page Rank of 5 with 0 clicks linking to your site or a page with a Page Rank of 3 with 1000 clicks linking back to your site?"

[Ecreativeworks]

From the only things you've said, technically the PageRank 5 link is better for SEO. BUT, there's a lot of buts:

But, the link driving tons of traffic to your site is obviously better for your site in terms of sales / conversion potential....

But all that traffic may link to your site in the future, or give you social mentions, making that traffic link better....

But, a site that is sending thousands of clicks is probably more likely to be relevant to your site, thus that link is likely to count for more....

But, the only factor you're looking at is PageRank, and there are far, far more important link factors, like the anchor text of the link, how relevant the page is to your page, where on the page the link appears, the authority of the page linking to you -- every one of these probably matters a lot more to your rankings that the PageRank of the source.

So if the only thing you're looking at is PageRank, of course the higher PageRank is better.But there's a lot more than PageRank.

To answer a question I think you may have been trying to ask: to my knowledge Google does not count the amount of traffic clicking on a link as a metric for the quality of that link. I've never seen any research or statements anywhere to suggest that it might.

[Naghirniac]

For me the scenario 2 is a lot better.Make a test: try some keywords and see the pagerank of the websites. Always there are lower PR sites in front of higher PR.

[KTaylor]

I agree, Julie. Google is not going to, or able to (unless the site with the link has Google Analytics) flow more link juice to a link that gets more clicks than another.

To answer the original poster's question, just because a link is getting a lot of clicks does not make it valuable. Traffic means nothing in the grand scheme of things. It's all about what that traffic is doing on your site once they get there. Are they purchasing? Are they turning into leads? Are they bouncing immediately? In all likelihood the traffic has some value, but to truly measure which would be better would require more information.

All else being equal, a link that drives traffic is better than one which does not.