Google PageRank (PR) Explained
Posted by Mike | Filed under GoogleOne of the most desired web page attributes website owners is a high Google PageRank (PR). Most webmasters associate a high PR with better search results in Google and more traffic. There are many advertisers and paid reviewers that insist on a high PR. The bottom line is the higher the PR the higher the potential for more traffic and more earnings.
According to Google PagePank is:
A Google feature that helps determine the rank of a site in our search results. PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your searches.
Basically, every site has a ranking from 1-10 (ten being the most important). Each webpage is assigned a PageRank based on how may sites are pointing to your page and how important/relevant the site pointing to you is. The higher the PageRank of an incoming link the more it is worth. Here is a chart that gives you an example of what it gets to attain a specific PageRank.
Using the graph, you can see that it would take over 2 million PR1 inbound links to attain a PR8 compared to just a single link from a PR10. This shows you that having quality inbound links is always better than having huge quantities of low PR inbound links. A single link on Google’s main page to your website is worth more than several million links on insignificant pages.
To get a general idea of how many pages are linking to your domain simply type in your domain name without the www. in front of it. For example: sportscardforum.com. You will notice there are 123,000 inbound links and I can generally see all the web pages that are linking to the site. It is also important to note that every page has a PageRank. Your main page is just one of many pages with a PR!
As noted by Google, PR and text-matching are combined to get the most relevant/important returns. Make yourself relevant and important by following some useful PageRank tip!
Improving PR and Tips for Showing Up Better in Google
- Write good, original content - Google absolutely love original content. Do not copy and paste content from other sites.
- Change your content daily - Google loves dynamic sites. If you blog, blog at least 1 time a day.
- Use a sitemap - a sitemap is the best way to organize your pages. See Google’s Sitemap reference to set one up. If you have a WordPress blog use the Google XML Sitemap Plugin.
- Do not use RSS feeds for your main page - simply setting up a website that takes in feed will not get you a high PR. Yes, your site is active with content, but the content is not original. Instead, have an RSS on section or a sub-page and link to it.
- Keep links on each page to a minimum - posting a million links on your web site is not recomended, especially outbound links. Google recommends less than 100, but I would say even less.
- Use No Follow tags on outbound links - add “no fol” to your links to tell the spiders not to leave your site.
- Use text vice images with text - spiders can only read text! Create an image with text on it will not be archived. If you are using images ensure you use the “alt” tag to describe the image.
- Use relevant title tags - the title tag shows up at the top, left of your browser and is what the search engines use for the title of your page. Make sure it is relevant to the article!
- Ensure key words are in your pages - ensure the keywords that you expect someone to type in Google to find your content is in your content. Bold them as well.
- Ensure all pages are linked together - ensure all you pages can be tracked back to your main page. If a search engine can’t get to it, it will not be found!
- Optimize your robot.txt file - this file give instructions to the spiders. Ensure you block out areas the spiders can’t see or your don’t want them to see. For instance, if you have an admin login or team area.
- Don’t block important content from search engines - if you make a site only visible to members then you are also blocking that content from the search engines. If a guest can’t see it then neither can the spiders.
Have some tips to share? Post a comment!
I’ve heard and read about PR for so many times…But I must admitt that your post gives very clean explanation about it, especially the tips. Thanks!
pagerank means nothing but a big brag for people to talk about. PR is not at all necessary for SERPS.
Hmm… I got a PR5 with only 1/5 of the amount of links in the mentioned forum. :p
Getting PR5 requires the skill of a link bounty hunter, and my site defies several points mentioned, particularly the part on nofollow since the blog I have is dofollowed (but admitably, nofollowing strategically [not by quantity] does help a lot).
Then again, PageRank don’t really mean much (unless you think your site scores an “above average rank”).
PageRank is only affected by the quantity (and quality) of links. Those points mentioned will help a little since it facilitates generating of links. However some of them have totally no effect as all:
1. Frequency of content: No effect at all. Old archived pages actually tend to clock better pageranks than new pages as they accumulate link juice from internal links arising from other pages.
2. Sitemap: No effect on PageRank. It only facilitates the finding of pages that would otherwised have been hidden to Google.
3. Title tag: No effect on PageRank. However it is still an important factor in SEO (not the same as PageRank).
4. Robots.txt: No effect on PageRank. It is not an important file if you have nothing much to block.
It’s been known that Google has been reducing the impact of internal links, so having too many too-well linked internal pages could bite you in the end as the PageRank is spread across many pages.
It is fun to read, although I don’t know to agree or to disagree on certain points.
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@multippt
You need a sitemap if you have content that may not be found easily. If your page can’t be found then you will not have a PR since there is not a single link pointing to that page.
I agree that frequency of content has nothing to do with PR, but will help your site show up better in Google.
The Title Tag has same effect. Notice that Google states it uses PR and key words to provide results.
Google may penalize you if it keeps hitting links that it can’t access. More with SEO than PR.
I will change the title of my tips to relect a more accurate title.
@Mike:
Sitemaps are totally optional. You actually do not need them at all. In addition, Sitemaps are known to bite you back if you use them inappropriately. (From personal experience)
Titles have no effect on PageRank, but instead it has an effect on results (but slightly, apparent from a mini project which I conducted some time ago). PageRank is one of the many, many factors that affect what you see on Google. PageRank does not equal to SEO, it is simply a small part of it.
Google won’t penalize you much if it hits pages it cannot access. For links that reach missing pages, they would not be counted (since Google can’t credit pages which do not exist). It would only deindex the page temporarily for several days. No effect on PageRank of that page since Google caches information of a site. However, it would remove the page if it is gone for an extended period of time. The rest of the site is not affected at all. (Also from personal experience)