June 22, 2009
Google Page Rank Explained
It 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 factors to take into account when trying to work out how much a link will be worth, but it can pretty much be summed up by the Page Rank that Google has given the page that you want a link from.
Google basically gives every page it finds a rank from 0 to 10. This wont happen straight away because Google only reviews Page Rank (PR) every six months or so. The highest rank is of course, 10 and lowest is 0 however there are some pages that simply have no PR (the PR just reads as n/a) and these will probably be new sites that Google hasnt found yet, or a fairly insignificant page deep in the site, or in the worst case scenario it could mean that Google has blacklisted that site. PR 10 sites are very rarely seen (except google.com) as there are only around 9 in existence.
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.
Having a high PR page does not directly benefit you, but it does mean that you will be in a position to offer better quality links out to other sites, and so you can then request high quality links back. So the higher your PR, the better chance youve got of being ranked highly, but only if you do the work to get the links, it wont do anything on its own.
There is almost a catch 22 situation when you first start trying to get your site some PR in that the main thing you need in order to acquire a good PR is quality links. The problem with this is that before you have any PR, people are going to be unwilling to give you a quality link because you wont be able to offer them one back. There is a way around this, but it takes time.
A good method to start off with is to find some sites that are in the same position as yourself (with related themes to yours if possible, but I wouldnt worry too much about that) i.e. they are looking to build some PR by getting lots of links, and exchange links with these sites. Then (provided these sites have kept their efforts up) in 6 months to a years time, these sites will have some PR, and will still be linking to you, therefore you will have some PR by then, making these initial link exchanges mutually beneficial.
There are several other criteria that Google considers when scoring you PR but nobody knows exactly what they are because this is part of what Google keeps a secret. But we do know that Google gives priority to sites that are updated regularly with new content over sites that are left for a long time.
The reason for this is that if the content on a site stays the same for a year, then Google sees it as old information that isnt necessarily relevant any more. Google wants to provide its searchers with the best, most relevant and up to date information as to what they are looking for. If you always bear this in mind then you should end up with a high PR site.
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