Web Design and Development
How To Improve and Maintain Your Google Pagerank
Being indexed by Google is a big success for any website because it gives access to billions of potential visitors. However, with all of the millions of websites jockeying for position in Google’s databases, your website might not get any traffic.
What determines traffic? One answer to this question is page rank.
Below, we explain the concept of page rank and discuss methods to maintain, as well as improve, your pagerank over time.
What Is Google PageRank?
PageRank (also known as PR) is a Google trademark which refers to their patented method of analyzing link popularity and determining the relative importance of web page.Google defines PageRank as follows:
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.
In other words, pagerank is mainly determined by an analysis of inbound links.
How Do I Increase My PageRank?
Having the aforementioned definition, it is quite obvious how one might go about increasing their website’s pagerank. You simply need to acquire links from other reputable websites. Of course, this is easier said than done, and it might take considerable time and effort to accumulate inbound links.
Unfortunately, pagerank is not this simple. There are other factors which may influence your rank. Even worse, you could actually be hurting your pagerank by some of your practices.
Could I Be Hurting My PageRank?
In addition to inbound link analysis, Google PageRank is also affected by outbound link analysis. This means that your website is also judged by the sites to which you link. Fortunately, this one factor is completely within your control.
If you link to low PR sites, or sites of a questionable nature, your own pagerank may be affected. To prevent this from happening, you can do one of two things: a) simply remove all links to any questionable sites, or b) add a special rel="nofollow" attribute to your link tags. See the code sample below:
<a href="http://www.QuestionableSite.com" rel="nofollow"> Questionable Site </a>
When Google sees this attribute embedded in links, it ignores the links and treats them as if they aren’t on your page.
In addition, when accumulating links, stay away from the following types of sites:
- Link farms
- Paid Link Opportunities
- Websites that are affiliated with spammers
- Large reciprocal linking circles
Does High PageRank Mean High Traffic?
Generally speaking, the higher your pagerank, the more traffic Google will send your way. Yes, there are other factors which will determine your traffic volume, such as type of site, size of site, and keywords. But if all things are equal, websites with high pagerank will dominate those with low pagerank. So it is to your benefit to regularly work to improve and maintain your Google PageRank.
Tags: Google, keywords, links, nofollow, pagerank14 Responses to “How To Improve and Maintain Your Google Pagerank”
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“If you link to low PR sites, or sites of a questionable nature, your own pagerank may be affected.”
Fortunately for the virgin blogger and website creator, the above statement is false. If this were true then it would make it very difficult for the beginner to acquire PR since the homepage will also link to all of his/her new pages and posts which will obviously have no PR.
PageRank is a function of inbound links only. If you examine the PageRank algorithm, you’ll find no term that desribes outbound links.
With that said, it HAS been known that a site may be penalized for linking to known link farms, however, this is not determined by the PageRank algorithm.
Because linking to known link farms is not common practice among SEO’s, outbound link scrutiny is not necessary when thinking about SE penalties.
Good point. Yes, linking to the other pages in your website will not hurt PR.
As for the calculation of PR, perhaps it is really just semantics here. But yes, you’re right, it is determined by inbound links, not outbound links.
However, whether or not your calculated PR remains the same, your toolbar PR and traffic can be negatively affected by bad practices. Such practices include – but are not limited to – linking to questionable websites, buying links, and selling links. And this results in the Google penalty that you mentioned.
I am wondering if all low page rank sites are rel=”nofollowed” how will their page rank increases?
Moreover, nofollowing a link is good to preserve the page rank or link juice but if everyone starts doing that then how will Google distribute page rank?
I have one more question:
How will you figure out which website is affiliated with spammers?
In general you would like to build back links to your site and by doing so how will you determine which website is associated with spammers? is there a tool or a way available ?
In general you would like to build back links to your site and by doing so how will you determine which website is associated with spammers? is there a tool or a way available ?
Thanks for the info!…I didn’t really know you could be hurt by the sites you link to
It would be great if the gained page rank does not go down. Thanks for the tip. My blog is still unranked though.
Thanks for the great article. It is not easy to obtain incoming links but i did not know that you get page rank credit for outgoing links. thanks for the information.
Many thanks to this article and its set of related links. Understanding PR and how it works is crucial for all businesses acquiring traffic through search engines like google and yahoo. Many methods of yesterday are no longer as effective as they used to be as search engines change the way their algorithms; its advisable to keep reading up on the latest SEO changes to beat competition.
Very important thing you miss to communicate is that PageRank is not position on organic search, many people seams to mix those two.
Many newbies question whether linking with lower page rank sites worsen the page rank….
Guys think it easy this way… linking is better. the more the better. linking with higher page rank is the best.
regards
To explain it in numbers is like this
lower page rank – 2 inbound links (good)
lower page rank – 200 inbound links (bad)
higher page rank – 2 inbound links (very good)
higher page rank – 200 inbound links (best)