Why PR actually matters in link buys

Had a great time at SEOroadshow over the weekend but a couple of the conversations I had got me thinking. I know thats unusual but bear with me and we will see what falls out of my fuzzy brain this morning…

When running a typical link building campaign most agencies and SEO’s will do the normal things to make sure they minimise the potential footprint of the campaign itself.

• They will make sure they spread the links around
• They will vary the footprints and anchors
• Etc etc

But most people will have a set of criteria that they will look for when finding places to buy build links and one of the factors people use will inevitably be PR.

I know all the debates about what PR is actually good for and im not going to get into that, lets just say that as a indicator of crawl frequency it does offer us a good insight into how the campaign will be perceived by the search engines

For many years I was a lonely voice in the spam world preaching that the pace at which you aquired links was a huge factor in how quickly your spam got burned. For real world clients I feel this is still a factor, if all the links are on high PR sites then the engines will discover them all in a short timeframe and it will appear very obvious that a link building or buying process took place.

If some of the links you gain are in lower PR sites, whilst the impact of the link itself may be reduced (That said PR isnt a good indicator of page trust imo) the profile of the links gained will be far more organic in my opinion.

For me you have to think about the campaign from the engines perspective to truly get the best effect and the pace of the link discovery is a factor that most dont seem to consider.

What do you think?