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Google Page Rank Explained
Posted by: | CommentsIt is no secret that in order to get your website ranked highly in the results pages of search engines like Google, you need to have links pointing at your site, and lots of them. But some links are worth more than others. You can be ranked above a site that has 20,000 links with 3000 if yours are of a better quality.
There are many things that affect how much a given link is worth but the main one that holds the most weight is the Page Rank or PR that Google has assigned the page youre receiving the link from.
Every page that Google can see will receive a Page Rank (PR) from 0-10, 0 being the lowest and 10 being the highest. This will not happen immediately because PR is only reviewed once every 6 months or so. Achieving a PR of 10 is almost impossible unless you have a very large, very popular corporate website, like apple.com, but even that is only a PR 9. Some pages have a PR of n/a and this can mean several things, one that the page is younger than 6 months and Google hasnt ranked it yet, or because its an unimportant page deep in a site, or because Google has detected something it doesnt like on that site and blacklisted it.
So what is there to gain from a good PR? Well, if your site receives a link from a high PR site like a PR 7 or 8, then it will massively more beneficial than a link from a PR 1 or 2 site. In essence, what PR is, is how valuable and genuine Google considers the content of your page to be on a scale of 0-10. Each link counts as a vote for the integrity of the page it is linking to, and so if a PR 8 page votes for you then Google concludes that your page must be of high value, because a high value site says it is, and it will therefore push you further up the results rankings.
A common misconception in the SEO world is that Google PR directly helps you get higher in the results rankings. The truth is it doesnt. It is extremely valuable however because once you start achieving good PR, people will want links from you, and because the link you will be giving them is of high quality, you can request a high quality link back.
When you first start trying to get some PR for your site, you will be faced with what is almost a catch 22 situation in that the main way in which PR is achieved, is by getting quality links. However, people will be unwilling to give you and quality links until you have some PR to give them a quality link back. So to start with, it is rather a long process.
A good way to start your campaign for high quality links is to find sites like yours, not necessarily theme related (although this does help) but sites that are relatively new and are eager to get links. These sites will be a good starting point for your linking because in six months to a years time these sites will have some PR (probably no more than 2 or 3 but thats still well worth having) and so in the long term will be highly beneficial to your sites search engine rankings, and your PR, meaning you can start exchanging links with higher and higher PR sites.
Links are not the only thing that count when building PR, something else that we know counts towards it is how often the content is updated. Content that is updated on a regular basis hold far more weight with Google than content that is left the same.
This is because the content will appear to have gone stale after a while; after all, news wouldnt be news if it was old! Google likes to be able to give its searchers the most up to date and relevant information it can, and so sites that are regularly updated will be given preference.
Ways to Build Links
Posted by: | CommentsDeveloping a proactive marketing strategy that will provide a consistent stream of good quality web traffic is not an impossible task. To get traffic you need a significant presence and to gain a presence you need firstly a good site that Google can read and understand, and secondly a network of high quality links to your website from many other authority websites.
This is not as difficult as it sounds as there are many systems in place to make this happen for you. First though, you need to understand that not all links are equal. Google uses a Page Rank system to value each page of each site that it knows about. Ranked from 0 ” 10 with 10 being the best, most popular and valuable sites, and 0 being sites it knows about but thinks very little of. Below 0 is a grey bar graphic in the Google toolbar which indicates that either Google doesnt know that the site exists or worse than that, that the site has been blacklisted by Google and should be avoided.
Ideally, we would all have links from homepages of PR 10 sites. The main flaw with that idea is that there are only about 10 PR 10 sites in existance and, as one might expect, they are usualy unwilling to give links to anyone brave enough to ask for them. So we must focus our efforts on getting links from websites with lower PR. PR 7 and 8 sites are still quite reluctant to give away links as they are very highly rated “authority sites” and so they can afford to be picky about who they link to.
Your mission is to get as many sites with some PR or the potential to soon get some PR to link to you as possible. This means in effect that getting a link from a newish site that hasnt been live long, has no PR but is working on link building is a good strategy to adopt in the longer term. Google only allocated PR twice per year, so if you are unlucky you might need to wait months in order to gain some PR. The amount you are given will depend upon the link juice you squeeze from all the sites that link to you. The more, high pr sites you receive a link from, the higher your PR will ultimately be.
So how does one go about getting these links together? Well, that is just the question. You can hunt down sites online that seem to link to other sites. There are quite a few sites about that provide reciprocal linking. The flaw with these is that reciprocal links aren’t really worth a great deal any more (although they are woth something as sometimes two-way links are natural eg.customer & supplier etc.they’re just not worth much). This is because the major search engines have cottoned on to the arrangement being made between sites with this type of link, they have therefore begun to downgrade their worth.
Easily the quickest and most effective way to reach the top of search engine result is by getting one way links, ie, getting sites to put a link to your site on theirs without linking back. This can however be quite hard because people tend to want something in return.
You may have problems achieving these one way links if you only have one website. There are a few answers to this issue, but one way link management is the clear way to go.
Effectively, your site is entered into a triangular arrangment where your site (site A) links to site B, which then links to site C, which then links back to site A (your site) this is beneficial to each site to the value of one one-way link. The big search engines cannot trace these links and so they reward you with a big push up the results rankings.
