Do you know how your site is ranking on Google? Out of the millions of websites available on the Internet, how important are your pages to the community ruled by Google?
While there are many other indications of ranking on the Internet, such as that designated by Alexa, we will limit this discussion to Google’s PageRank as its value is perceived as the greatest as far as internet marketing goes.
What Is PageRank
According to Google, PageRank is determined largely, almost exclusively, by the number of links to your web page. Each link from another site or another page on your site contributes to rank, developing a strategy to increase links to your site is bound to help Improve Your PageRank.
Not all links are created equally, there are differences when it comes to link quality. A link from a high ranking page is worth far more than others, and one going out to a designated “link farm” can actually do more harm than good. PageRank should not be confused with search engine ranking pages (SERPs). Instead, it is just one factor used to determine how high your website appears in Google search results.
How Is PageRank Calculated
Although Google tends to change its algorithms regularly, Google PageRank always takes into account the number of inbound and outbound links to and from the URL. In addition, a damping factor is included that calculates each page’s share of the referring link’s rank.
Because each page must share the referral value, it is also important how many links are coming from a particular site but how much this factor influences rank is debatable. More than likely it is negligible so it is always best to seek links from high ranking pages.
Want to know what your site’s current PageRank is? Install the Google toolbar on your browser and the number (one through 10) will be noted when you visit the URL.
How To Improve Your PageRank
PageRank is a rather quirky indicator used by Google. It can change quickly, and often. However, updates take longer so even if your page achieves a higher ranking, it may not show up immediately.
Understand that PageRank applies to the entire website, not just a single page, although each single page contributes to the overall rank.
It is also true that internal links contribute to rank and the more pages your site contains, the greater its chances of reaching the maximum rating. Of course, this does not apply to files such as robots.txt which are not indexed by Google. Another thing to bear in mind is that links are only calculated as part of PageRank if they come from a site indexed by Google, otherwise they are considered “dangling links”.
Without any inbound or outbound links on a site of several pages, the ranking for each is less than one. Even adding a link from one page to the next will help. Creating a link from each page to all others on your site helps even more. This is a really easy way to increase ranking of the site.
Another thing you can do to help Improve Your Pagerank, is to standardise your URL throughout the Internet. For instance, if your site is www.example.com, then do not use ww.example.com/ or www.example.com/index. Each of these would be considered another page; sharing a portion of total ranking and taking away the value of your site’s overall PageRank.
When it comes to PageRank, links are the most important aspect. This is why there are people who are actually hired to do nothing more than work on linking strategies for a company. Take a tip from Google and start building your own links in order to Improve Your PageRank, which could bring you more traffic and profit.
About Sean Rasmussen
I was about to start my quest to build pagerank3 in 90 days but….Google no longer care about pagerank. Yes! you read it right. Google quietly drop pageranks just this week and said that don’t focus on pagerank.
Hi AgentMango,
Google have in fact dropped the PageRank data from the Google webmaster tools interface. In my opinion, this really has no importance on the effect of pagerank. Look at it like this…when you are doing blog comments and link exchanges etc, you can bet your boots that other website owners are still going to check your pagerank before approving your comments, or even think about link exchange with your site. That’s my opinion anyway
Regards – Sean
Couldn’t agree more. PR also says something to a prospective visitor about the quality of your site – and encourages clicks to it. In other words it is a guide to someone looking for a good site to provide the information they are seeking.
Additionally, it helps if you want to sell a site.
Dear Sean,
Nice post actually.
I want to ask you about Alexa Rangking?
What do you think for a website which have a high Alexa Rangking but have no PR?
From your opinion, we better have a website with a high PR or a high Alexa Rangking?
Thanks,
JoeRevod
Hi Joe,
Alexa ranking is based on the amount of traffic recorded over a 3 month period from users that have the Alexa toolbar installed…compared to pagerank, which is basically determined by how many, and the quality of the links pointing to your site.
So, if you are doing all the right things, you will get a good amount of traffic to your site, which will help to lower your Alexa ranking. High PR is more important in my opinion as building links is an integral part of SEO. In answer to your question, you want to aim for both over time.
Regards – Sean
Sean
Forget where I heard it, but I like like the expression
“links are the currency of the web”.
AgentMango – Google has an internal pagerank and then there is the one we see. I’m sure it will continue internally for algo purposes.
regards,
Mark
Hi Reactorr,
“Currency of the web” …I like it
Without links, you may have a smaller amount of currency in your pocket, that’s for sure!
Regards – Sean
This is news to me – I will have to action internal linking between all the pages of my sites to each other. Thanks for the tip, Sean
It all takes time Wal, you will pick up different strategies and tips as you move forward. Creating internal and external links, and building backlinks to your site is an extremely important part of SEO and traffic generation. Glad to be of help.
Regards – Sean
Sean
I am employing internal linking on my site. There is one question though.
When I write a blog post I will link to related posts. At times I have keywords in the posts for a article that isn’t written yet. Is there any detriment to going back later and adding those links in once the article is written?
No harm at all Gee.
Please remind us – How do you check a site’s PR?
Try this Firefox addon Lina https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/321
Hi Sean,
I’m trying really hard to improve my site’s PR. This is where it’s really handy to have lots of free tools that will help me to analyze my competition. It’s really interesting to see where my competition is getting their backlinks from.
Is it too much to want a PR 4 by the end of the year?
Keep working on your backlinks Jazz, and the quality of them. PR4 is not easy to achieve, but has been, and can, be done
Wow I didn’t realize how important linking is and how it applies. I am a novice at this and I am trying to figure out how to check the in and out links of sites.
I also didn’t realize that linking in your site could help get attention.
Thank you for a great article!
Mike