Variety is the spice of life.

It’s also the spice of a great backlink profile.

Variety tells Google that you’re acquiring your backlinks in a natural way, where people love your content and decide to share it of their own volition—in a variety of ways on a variety of websites.

But when you’re trying to spike your site’s SEO performance with incredible backlinks, where do you start?

Forget variety. Start with sites that have a high PageRank (PR).

These sites have extra authority, SEO juice and have already gained recognition for being the best in their niche.

They’re not just there to sit and look pretty in your backlink profile.

Not only can their addition directly result in a ranking surge, but you could also experience other benefits such as increased referral traffic, a new audience and, more importantly, a sales boost!

What Is PageRank?

PageRank (PR) is an algorithm, created by Google, that is used to determine the ranking position of any website. Scored on a scale of zero to 10, PR is used to measure the importance and relevance of a single webpage.

Although PR is not the sole ranking factor, it is used heavily to define where a single website will rank for primary keywords in SERPs.

To calculate the PR of any given page, you can use a free online tool such as PRChecker. Once you’ve entered the URL, you’ll be given the Google PR for that page.

The Effect of High PR Websites on SEO

Backlinks given from high PR sites pass more credit through to your own.

Search engines use backlinks as a way to pass reputation through a range of websites. This means backlink profiles containing links from high PR sites could experience the same authoritative stance and reputation of the linking site.

Part of a good backlink profile, these high PR backlinks should be found amongst a range of other link types, including, but not limited to:

• Blog comments
• Editorial links
• Directories
• Niche website links
• Image links

You can use a clever link monitoring tool like Monitor Backlinks to stay on top of the types of backlinks your site is acquiring, as well as those all-important metrics.

You’ll want to be aiming for backlinks from sites with the highest PR, because those with a PR of 10 are much more valuable than those with a PR of two.

4 Unconventional Ways to Gain Backlinks from High PR Sites

Now that we’ve gotten to grips with understanding the SEO benefits of gaining high PR backlinks to your site, you’ll need to put together a strategy.

Here are some proven techniques to help you grab those SEO-rich links:

1. Guest Blogging

Guest blogging is the most common technique to gain high PR backlinks to your site.

You can do this by writing an article for an external site, which contains a link back to a page on your own.

Finding high PR sites

You can find sites for guest blogging by searching for the following variations:

• [“niche” + “write for us”]
• [“niche” + “contribute”]
• [“niche” + “submit an article”]