How does PageRank work?

PageRank is the science behind where you rank in the search results. The higher your PR, the higher up in the results for a specific keyword. The lower your PR, the lower in the results. A PR is achieved by the following four factors:

• The total amount of recommendations you have (in other words, the number of relevant back links). Note: these back links must be related to your website and be relevant.
• The amount of links from high PR websites has a much bigger impact than links from low PR websites.
• Your PR is diluted by the amount of external links on your own website. In other words, if you are linking to a bunch of other websites, you are lowering your score.
• and finally, websites that have been around longer have a much bigger impact or your PR than websites that have only been around for a short period of time. It is sometimes better to have a back link from a lower PR that is aged, than a higher PR who is new to the web.

If you would like to estimate your PageRank, you can do so by using the following method. Look up the PageRank for each of your back links. Then, calculate the total point value using the table below:

PR1 = 8 points

PR2 = 64 points

PR3 = 512 points

PR4 = 4096 points

PR5 = 32768 points

PR6 = 262144 points

PR7 = 2097152 points

PR8 = 16777216 points

PR9 = 134217728 points

PR10 = 1073741824 points

Next, take your total point value and enter it into the formula below where C(A) represents the total number of back links:

PR(pts) * 0.85 / C(A) = PR points transferred through one link

Here are a few things to consider when PR-building:

• If you are able to, start off with an older domain name. If you can purchase a website that’s been around for a while, you will rank faster.
• Extend your domain name registration for 10 years. If you know you’re going to be around for a while, let Google know.
• Add rel=”nofollow” to your anchor tag to prevent GoogleBot from following links and pages that dilute your PR.

If you would like to begin link building, check out the table below:

As you can see, it takes much more effort to achieve a higher PR simply by adding back links. It is far easier to build your PageRank if you can get the attention of high PR websites.

We have a tool in our resources section so you can see the amount of back links and how Google currently ranks your website. Click here for the PR tool.

Here is a technique I use when trading links with a relevant website. Please do not use this technique to spam, that will do you no good in the long run. If you can find relevant Blogs that are very closely related to your website, I recommend finding a blog entry that has a high PageRank. I recommend reading the entire article and leaving a nice, detailed comment that is clearly helpful and part of the discussion. Right below your comment, add a small link to your website. Many blogs have a place for you to add your URL to your comment. Assuming your not spamming, the author of the blog entry will not flag your comment as spam. Here is a technique to finding high quality blogs that are related to your website:

Type this into Google:
inurl: “blog” “post a comment” -”comments closed” “YOUR KEYWORDS”

EDU Websites

If you can get a back link from an EDU website, it will help your PageRank tremendously. If you are currently in college, you should be able to gain access to your schools web server. If you can find friends that have EDU websites that are relevant to yours, ask them to trade links with you, it will certainly help you. Here is a technique for finding EDU blogs on the web to comment on:

Type this into Google
site:.edu inurl: “blog” “post a comment” -”comments closed” “YOUR KEYWORDS”

Link Exchanges

Link exchanges are another excellent way to increase your search engine ranking, assuming you’re exchanging quality links of course. The concept is simple-all of the websites within the link exchange have a Links page on their website and that page contains links to other websites they have traded with. You need to be made aware of something very important though. Google will penalize you for having a Links page with over 50 websites automatically. By having over 50 external links on one page, Google will actually decrease the value of the links you are trading. To prevent this, it is recommended to only trade links with websites that have high PageRank and not participate in over 50 link exchanges.

• Link Metro is a wonderful link exchange service. Website A chooses to exchange links with Website B. Website A places Website B’s link on the website’s link page. Website B can choose to accept or decline the exchange. If Website A accepts the exchange, Website B is given the Website A’s link and description. If Website A declines, Website B is notified to remove the URL.

Social Networking

Social networking sites are growing very quickly. I’m not referring to MySpace and FaceBook, who are famous for bringing people together, but I’m actually referring to business-to-business and business-to-customer networking.
Here are a few websites you should invest your time in:

• 43 Things – allows you to tag certain “things” and promote what people want to do. So if someone wants to learn web design, you can type “learn web design” and see who is in that category and add comments and a link to your course-without spamming of course.
• Squidoo – allows you to create “lenses” for specific topics to promote and advertise your products. Squidoo pages are optimized for search engines can have a very high PageRank.

Create a Blog

If you are promoting your own product, nothing improves your traffic more than adding a blog to your website and constantly updating it. Blogs are very search engine friendly and will help you increase your PageRank at record time. A relevant blog can help you achieve the results you’re looking for much faster than a boring sales page. Here are a few things you can do to get results:

• Put together a canned list of blog entries. If you’re product is on web design, write 20 web design entries and post one entry per day.
• Change the dates of your blog entries so they appear as if they’ve existed for a longer period of time, but continue to update the blog every day with relevant keywords and articles.
• Seed your Blog with relevant comments (even if they’re not your own). Make those comments look like someone else wrote them and even write a few negative comments. This will make your blog appear as if it’s popular and the search engines will reward you for it.
• Power up your blog posts with social networking sites: Del.icio.us, Digg, Reddit, Slashdot, StumbleUpon, Technorati, and Yahoo! My Web.Articles

Articles 

Create a free article section for your website and feature several keyword related articles for your potential customers to read. Not only will they be impressed with the free information, search engines will rank your individual article pages and increase traffic to your website. This will also prevent pay per click (PPC) advertisers (such as Google AdWords) from potentially marking your website as spam.

You can make money by having well written articles on your website as well. You can embed Affiliate links into your content and you can place Google AdSense advertisements throughout the copy of your article. Just because you’re offering the information for free doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t try to monetize it-just remember not to go too far.

Check out the table below, it does a wonderful job at showing how many links you will need to attain a high ranking. Say we have a website that has a PageRank of 1. In order to gain a PageRank of 3, you will need to trade 555 links from websites that have a PageRank of 3 and fewer than 50 external links to achieve that new PageRank. Sounds difficult, doesn’t it? Not really! The Yahoo! Directory and the DMOZ directory usually both have extremely high a PageRank’s. If you can simply get an internal link from a website that has a PageRank of 5, achieving a PageRank of 3 only requires that one person to link to you!

In theory, you can back link your way into a PageRank of 8 (from a PageRank of 1) by having 2,795,522 websites link to you, but it’s important to realize that if you practice this scheme (which Google considers link farming), you will get banned from the search engines.

If your website has a PageRank 0, there may be a problem that you should investigate. Google gives this PageRank as a penalty for websites that are promoted by unethical and illegal means, including link farming. If you have just registered a domain, don’t fret—Google automatically registers a Page Rank of 0 for newly registered domain names.

Other things to boost your PageRank:

• Purchase an older domain name. Statistics show that those who purchase old domain names rank better (and faster) in Google. I have personally seen this and it does help.
• When you purchase your domain, don’t purchase it for just one year. Statistics also show that websites that are registered for 10 years instead of 1 perform better in Google and other search engines. This is because search engines assume relevancy for websites that “are going to be around for a while”.
• If you have a link that you do not want crawled for purposes of PageRank, add rel=”nofollow” to your anchor tag (<a href=”#” rel=”nofollow”>Example</a>).
• If you have text within a web page that you don’t want the search engine to craw, you can avoid the problem by converting your text into an image. The bots that crawl websites are unable to crawl images for text, so by placing the text into an image in Adobe Photoshop can save you from loosing your positions in the search engines.