Web & SEO » Pagerank

The Layman’s Guide to the Google Pagerank Algorithm

admin — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 23:32:51 +0000

Let me ask you: If you have a certain idea or topic in mind, and you wish to find out more about this topic, what do you do? Ten years ago you would probably have gone to the library, but today… You GOOGLE IT!

If you take anybody currently living in the modern world, chances are that is what they will tell you. Google is King! Over the course of just a few years, Google has gone from a couple of smart guys at Stanford University with the revolutionary idea of making the entire internet available from their desktop, to being the undisputed gatekeeper to nearly every single portion of humanity’s collective knowledge.

The Google search engine has in fact become so popular and proliferous that the word ‘google’ itself has now become a verb! (As in, if you want to find out more about a certain person, you just google them.)

Every time you do a search, you will see the term or phrase that you searched at the top, followed by about ten webpages that Google thinks are most relevant to your term. Since there are literally tens of millions of Google searches every single day, it is not a great leap to think that the websites that manage to get their ranking very high in Google will get ALOT of free visitors and traffic.

But what is it exactly that determines which websites get listed in the top ten listings? Well, the system that is behind every single search result that you see is called the PageRank system, named after its creator and co-founder of Google, Larry Page.

Before the PageRank system, there did exist some other methodologies for determining web search relevance and delivering accurate results, but none of them were as robust, accurate, democratic, or resistant to human error as PageRank.

-What Puts PageRank in A League of Its Own-

There are basically two major ideas behind the PageRank system that have made it so revolutionary:

First, the PageRank system is rather democratic in nature because every time one website (we will call it site A) links to some different website (we will call it site B), that link is considered to be a ‘vote’ by site A that site B has good information, or for some reason is worthy of being viewed and read. This concept of the democratic nature of the links found all over the internet is a vital main idea behind the PR system.

Second (and this is the part that really put PageRank on the level), NOT ALL LINKS ARE CREATED EQUAL!

That is to say that if you have two links coming to your website, one from Forbes.com and another from some backwater, fly-by-night dot com, these two links will not be treated equally.

So what does this mean for the question of how did the highest ranked sites get where they are? They have been around for long enough to have numerous popular sites link to them, they have valuable, relevant, dynamic content, and chances are that they probably link to other related websites.

Another vital (but not so revolutionary) mechanism behind determining which webpages are displayed for certain keywords is an advanced text-matching system. Google’s text-matching system is able to deliver highly relevant webpages because of the vast computing power behind the Google search engine itself.

-Technical Explanation of a Website’s PageRank-

This following part is a technical explanation for those who want to further understand the nature of the PageRank algorithm. If you are only interested in learning how to improve your own site’s PR, then feel free to skip to the next section.

With the PageRank algorithm, every single website on the internet is given a numerical PR value somewhere between 1 and 10, with 10 being the best. It will help if you can remember from your math class what a logarithm is, because the assignment of a certain PR number is logarithmic in nature, similar to the Richter scale of measuring earthquakes.

This is important to understand, especially if you want to increase your own PageRank. In terms of PageRank, this means that a PR6 site is not twice as valuable as a PR5 site, but actually TEN TIMES as valuble. So this would mean (not exactly but approximately) that an incoming link from a PR6 site would give you as much value as about a few dozen PR4 sites. Notice that a PR6 incoming link will NOT give the value of 100 PR4 links, because PageRank is concerned with the quantity of incoming links as well as how important they are.

-Tips For Improving The PR of Your Site or Blog-

Try to create content that is valuable, funny, or for some reason really makes people want to link to it. This strategy will increase your number of incoming links without any extra work, which will thereby increase the PageRank of your site or blog.

A ‘link farm’ is a website that has hundreds or thousands of incoming and outgoing links. Sites like this can actively inflate PageRank to make a site seem more relevant than it actually is, so Google will ‘punish’ websites associated with link farms by bringing them down in the search rankings.

Do not worry or feel like your site or blog is not good enough if after just a few months or so you do not have a high PageRank and are not listed very high in the search results. It takes time to build PR, so the better your content and the longer you have been online, the better chance you have at naturally gaining a higher PR.

See if you can find a few high-quality websites or blogs out there related to your own site topic, and contact the owner to see is they would be interested in linking to your site if you link to theirs. This is called ‘link exchanging,’ and if you do it to much then Google may ‘punish’ you becase this is another way of inflating PR, but exchanging links with a few quality sites will help you.

One last thing, and this has been stressed throughout the article, there really is a single golden rule that you can apply to boost your PageRank: create MASSIVELY VALUABLE information and content that people will naturally want to link to on their own, and you are set.

Improve Your Google Pagerank – SEO Tips and Affordable, Budget Hosting Plans and Services – the Hosting Hole

admin — Sat, 05 Jun 2010 23:42:23 +0000

If you can improve your Google PageRank then you will have a sure-fire way of improving your listing position. Google states very clearly that their PageRank and your link density is a very important part of how they decide your listing position for any keyword.

There are steps you can take to improve that and use an approximation to the Google PageRank formula to calculate how successful you are being. However, no one really knows what is required to get from one page rank figure to the next. If it takes 10 linking points to get a page rank at all, it will likely take a lot more to get from 1 to 2. It might take hundreds of thousands to get from 5 to 6, but many sites seem to get to page rank 3 and then stop.

Page rank is a measurement of the relative number of links to your webpage and the importance of the sites making these links, compared to the number of links leaving your web page. Page rank is what it says. It is a ranking of your web pages, not your whole website. This is particularly useful since it lists individual pages on your website, not the whole website. Check the current PageRank of your site / URL here.

These links need not be from outside sources, since internal page linking also counts. If one of your pages is linked to your home page, your home page gets a share of that page’s rank. The share decreases for each other page that the page in question is linked to. Each page in your website starts off with a page rank of 1. That then increases or reduces according to your internal linking strategy, and it is possible to design that strategy to provide as much PR as possible to one or more pages in your website.

Once you have optimized your internal links, you should then try to achieve as many links back to your website as possible from other websites. Keep in mind that you should try to get other web pages to link to specific pages on your site, that you have chosen either for their relevance to the keyword in question, or because that is the page that you want to get listed highest in Google.

Also keep in mind that websites with a very good page rank on their home page might be providing you with a link from a page deep in their site that has a very low PR, or even zero. A links page, for example, with only one link to the page but a hundred out will provide with next to no benefit. If the link is reciprocated, you could be giving that website more page rank points than you are getting back.

Another very important note. Make positively sure your hosting provider is consistent and reliable. Nobody exactly know how often Google updates PageRank but records show that PageRank updates 4-5 times a year on average. DO NOT take a chance of your website being down during the PageRank update. You must ensure that you have quality, reliable web hosting from an industry leader. So how do you choose a hosting provider when there are thousands of hosting companies available online? These tips will steer you in the right direction.

We also have a collection of Google Pagerank related articles discussing the basics of PageRank and how to improve PageRank. These articles include:Unbiased Review of Google PageRank

Google PageRank is one of the very main factors which decide the ranking of Google search results. PageRank is made upon how many votes you have and the importance of those votes.How to Protect Your Site from A Google PageRank Drop

For the uninitiated, Google ranks all pages on the web with a scale of PR0 to PR10 — higher is better. High PR sites or pages receive most of the traffic for competitive keywords or phrases.What is PageRank and How Does It Work?

Google was the favorite among search engine. Most of Google’s popularity is credited to its preferred form of search engine optimization, a trademarked program Google dubbed Google PageRank.10 Ways to Outsmart Google’s PageRank System

A list of 10 things you can do to lessen the impact of a sudden drop of the almighty Google PageRankPlease visit us at: http://www.thehostinghole.com for more information on PageRank, SEO and Web HostingCopyright © – 2000-2008; http://www.thehostinghole.com – All rights reserved.

Google Pagerank Algorithm Explained

admin — Sun, 30 May 2010 08:32:10 +0000

Google uses the PageRank algorithm to rank pages in their search engine results. The algorithm is based on analysing link structures: each link can be seen as a vote by a page for another page it links to. It is necessary to have a basic understanding of how PageRank works to be able to optimize web sites for the Google search engine .

History of PageRank

PageRank was invented by Larry Page at Stanford University, and named after him. Page began the project in 1995, and worked on it with Sergey Brin. The project then lead to the prototype Google in 1998. Google Inc. was founded to manage the Google search engine, which used PageRank. Currently the trademark PageRank belongs to Google Inc., but the original patent for the PageRank algorithm is assigned to Stanford University.

Google has since grown to the largest search engine in the world, with nearly two thirds of searches made on Google. The PageRank algorithm is still one of the factors taken into account in Google’s search engine result ranking, and it is constantly followed by interested search engine marketing specialists around the world.

The PageRank Algorithm

A good analogy for the PageRank algorithm is that each link is a vote for the target page. This link structure of the web is analyzed recursively, so that the value of each vote depends on the PageRank of the voting page, calculated from the votes in the previous iteration of PageRank.

When a new page comes into being in this link structure, it will only get a PageRank value once other pages link to it. Each link will give some PageRank to the new page, the amount a single link gives depending mostly on two things: the PageRank of the linking page, and the number of links on it. The more outbound links a page has, the less weight each of them will have.

The actual algorithm used by Google is, naturally, more complicated then this. That algorithm also takes into account page topics. Pages with the same, or related topic that link to each other will carry more weight with their links than completely different pages that link to each other.

It is thought that raw PageRank data exists as a floating point number for each page. These real time values are constantly updated by Google crawlers. The visible PageRank value that can be seen on the Google Toolbar is on a scale from zero to ten. This is exported from the real time PR data approximately once every three months. On Google Directory the PageRank is reported as an eight unit measure, which is also periodically compiled from the real time data, though less often than the toolbar PageRank is.

In Conclusion

The voting analogy describes the PageRank algorithm fairly well, but, though Google may claim so, it is not a completely democratic system. The weight of each link depends both on the PageRank of the page linking and the number of links it has. To improve PageRank, more inbound links, preferably from pages with high PageRank, must be acquired.

The Big Google Pagerank Slap – Perception is Everything

admin — Fri, 28 May 2010 23:31:20 +0000

Recently Google did a major PageRank update where a lot of sites were downgraded. Many experts believe this PageRank update was Google’s response to link selling – sites which sell links lost points in their PageRank.

Google measures all web pages on a scale of importance from 0 to 10, which is shown in a small green pixel bar on browsers carrying the Google Toolbar. PageRank is “supposedly” measured by the number of backlinks to your site.

Online democracy in action, a link is a vote for your site. The more votes you have the higher your site is ranked. At least that’s how it was supposed to work until a lot of high PR sites started selling links and put a monkey wrench into the whole system.

The latest update may be a smart move on Google’s part to curtail this practice; who’s going to buy a link from a PR2 or even a PR4 site? Besides this could be more than a warning that your site will go down even further if you continue to sell links.

Now this is more of a cosmetic change in PageRank than a real change in your true rankings in Google. Just because your PR goes down doesn’t mean your keyword rankings or traffic from Google also goes down.

I saw some of my sites go up, some stayed the same, but my major site took a big hit – falling from PR6 to PR4. This was more of a devastating blow than I expected mainly for psychological reasons than actual consequences. After years of building the best content you can muster and constantly getting quality one-way links, to see that PageRank drop was very disappointing and hits to the core of your online work.

I have been around for a while so I have experienced many Google Updates – anyone remember the Florida Update? I also keep my ears peeled to discussions of the latest updates in Webmasterworld and Stompernet, and I even read Matt Cutts when I get real nervous… so I knew not to panic just because of the sudden drop in PageRank.

I also knew what most of the SEO experts were saying was true because my major keywords stayed the same and my Google traffic actually went up. But that’s little comfort when you’re talking about Google; you immediately go into overdrive and try to figure out where you went wrong. What caused the drop – because whether PageRank is meaningless or not, you’re still going in the wrong direction.

I saw many of my competitors drop too, but many stayed the same and even a few increased in PageRank. What are they doing right; what am I doing wrong? I don’t sell links but does Google think I am selling links was my main concern? I even moved one external link from my main page to another part of my site, just in case Google is mistaking that as a paid link.

Welcome to webmaster’s paranoid hell!

For SEO reasons I have very few external links on my main page. Can’t see why Google downgraded my main site. I have been at PR6 for years.

Herein lies my main beef, with Google you never really know where you stand; you are constantly walking on eggshells. No matter how good your content or your site is – one misstep and you could be in the doghouse. All your hard work can be taken away in a heartbeat.

It wouldn’t matter so much if it was one of the other two major search engines downgrading your site but this is Google.

Free organic traffic from Google is vital to any online site or business. I would take traffic from Google over any other source of traffic on the web, except for traffic coming from my articles on other sites, and even that traffic probably originated from a search in Google.

Google and Google PageRank have always been important to me – that’s one of the reasons a sudden large drop causes so much concern. There’s another important reason Google PageRank is important to me.

Most SEO experts mistakenly believe PageRank is meaningless because Google is not giving us the true ranking of any site or revealing all the backlinks, which is supposedly one of the major factors in how Google ranks sites. While this fact is obviously true, it has caused many to jump to another conclusion.

Because Google is not giving us the real ranking, many webmasters have dismissed PageRank as a vital element in their sites. Don’t make the same mistake.

Google PageRank is extremely important if you’re doing business on the web. The higher PR you have, the better. But it has nothing to do with keyword rankings or first page SERPs.

What many SEO experts fail to realize (not really their business) is the whole “perceived” value of PageRank.

Google, hate it or love it, has become the most respected company on the web in the eyes of the majority of the web’s users. It carries enormous weight and prestige. The “perceived” value of a high PR7 or PR8 is extremely valuable.

We are not talking about link selling; we are talking about how a perspective business partner or customer will treat your site or business.

Say you have two identical sites you want to do business with online and you discover one is a Google PR2 site and the other is a Google PR8 site – which one would you choose to do business with? Honestly?

From first-hand experience, I know any online company or marketer will get more business offers and be offered more partnerships/joint ventures if you have a high Google PR site than a low one. It will make a difference to your bottom line.

PageRank is important. PageRank has meaning. Even if it has little bearing on your SERPs rankings or Google traffic, PageRank can greatly influence the success of your online site or venture. Don’t ignore or dismiss PageRank as a meaningless relic that didn’t quite work out as Google had planned for it in the first place.

High PageRank will always be valuable.

The day Google gives its own site a PageRank of PR1 or PR2 instead of the current PR10 – that’s the day you can dismiss PageRank as truly meaningless.

Is Pagerank Decay a Hamster Wheel for Webmasters?

admin — Thu, 20 May 2010 23:42:11 +0000

Google Pagerank – a Guide for Virgins

admin — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 09:57:40 +0000

Google PageRank is very much like penis size:

- Everyone thinks it’s important.

- No one admits it’s important (unless you’ve got a huge one).

- Everyone is interested in the size of everyone else’s.

I started a small website earlier this year to investigate whether I could supplement my income. In researching website optimization, I came across PageRank size for the first time and was amazed about how many people obsessed about it. Obviously everyone wants a larger one and there are various methods of increasing it – some proven, some painful, and some downright silly.

But let me explain what PageRank is first.

PageRank is one of the many factors Google takes into account when it returns the results for a search term. It is, in effect, Google’s evaluation of how important a site is. The main element in this is the number of sites linking to your site and their PageRank size. This can be viewed as a popularity contest with the sites with the bigger PageRanks getting bigger votes (ain’t that always the way).

The upshot of this is that sites with, shall we say, less than a handful of PageRank cannot get close to the top of the results when popular keywords are searched upon, and have to rely on more specific keywords to get traffic from search engines.

PageRank is measured from 0-10. Sites can be out into three categories:

PageRank 0-2 – New websites that are just starting out. Websites that have come to terms with the size of their PageRank and have given up trying to increase it (but secretly hope it’ll still grow over time). Bad boys who have broken the rules.

PageRank 3-6 – Established websites that have proven they can perform. Niche websites that have a big enough PageRank to do what they need it to do.

PageRank 7-10 – Some of these guys’ PageRank is so big it’ll knock you over if they turn to quickly in the communal showers. In order to compete with this PageRank, one needs to develop other techniques to establish your own area of specialist expertise.

In order to not get their PageRank laughed at in those showers, webmasters are constantly looking to increase it. Here are a few ways to stretch that PageRank.

Increase the Girth – By increasing the number of pages on the site, it increases the amount of PageRank the webmaster can play with. If those pages point internally then it can increase the PageRank of those pages for instance. As we all know, girth is a secondary factor when it comes to performance and you should be careful that you don’t create pages with no real value or content, as one can be punished for that (and not in a nice way).

Expose Yourself – Advertising your website is a core piece of your strategy. However, to really increase that PageRank, you need incoming, permanent, links not occasional pay-per-click ads or banners that can change day-to-day or week-to-week. Ways to do this include, writing high quality articles that get published on a number of sites (the author is still working on getting that one right), being active in fora associated with the subject of your website, and forming a group in one or more of the social websites. You certainly shouldn’t keep it in your pants, but over-exposure can be detrimental to your PageRank too, if you are deemed to be spamming.

Hire Some Prostitutes – There are some websites (the author is told) that will provide links to your website for a fee. Now, this is illegal in the United States of Google and there are severe penalties if you are caught. They rely on snitches to let them know it’s happening, so this kind of activity tends to happen on street corners and undesirable neighborhoods on the web. This is not recommended.

“Don’t Worry About It, It Happens to Everyone” – There is a small but vocal group that says you shouldn’t worry about the size of it and just concentrate on providing good content for your visitors. This is the equivalent of “the size doesn’t matter, it’s what you do with it Honey”, or a favorite of my ex-wife’s – “more than a mouthful’s a waste”. The reality is that people visit your website because of what’s on it, but they won’t visit if they don’t know it’s there – so a balance is needed.

There are also a number of things you should avoid that may shrivel your PageRank.

Getting Caught With Your Pants Down – Anything that Google prohibits (and there is a lot) can adversely affect your PageRank if they catch you in the act. So keep your nose clean and make sure you understand the rules.

Orgies – Simply exchanging links with other sites doesn’t really have an effect on your PageRank (although it still might generate traffic) and using “link farms” can have a negative effect. The author has never visited a “link farm” (to his knowledge) but imagines they are akin some sort of communal retreat for perverts, or like one of those swinging parties you never get invited to.

Flashing – Pop-ups are not actually banned but they are obviously unpopular. A number of directories are now banning sites that have excessive pop-ups, which will decrease the number of sites that will publish a link to your site if you do have lots of pop-ups.

In summary, PageRank is a very important aspect, but to obsess over it means you won’t satisfy your visitors in other areas, which might be important to them. If it is that important to you, you need to get out and meet people!

If it’s big enough to do the job, be happy.

Google’s Matt Cutts Talks About Pagerank

admin — Tue, 23 Feb 2010 20:03:47 +0000

PageRank is that magic number between 1 and 10 that Google assigns to every website. It is a number that is computed using the link structure of the World Wide Web and it measures the relative importance of all pages. It is an important number that partially allows Google to return the best results to a user’s query.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) gurus spend much of their time trying to improve a site’s PageRank because the larger this number the larger the traffic driven to the site via organic search results. Even though the algorithm for computing a page’s PageRank was published by Google’s founders in 1995, the algorithm has since been modified to scale up to the web’s enormous size as possible and also to circumvent being exploited by SEO experts. These continuous changes to the algorithm are not published and SEO engineers often find themselves trying to understand how the algorithm works by monitoring Google’s behavior.

It is widely believed that the larger a page’s PageRank the higher it will appear on Google’s homepage and the more traffic it will receive. As a result, many webmasters lose a lot of sleep over improving their site’s PageRank. Since the value of PageRank depends on the number and quality of incoming links, webmasters often pay a premium to have a high PageRank site link to theirs. In addition, webmasters can monetize their site by selling links to others; if they manage to get their PageRank to a value larger than 5 then they can sell these links at a high cost. All these have created an entire economy around Google’s magic number.

Matt Cutts is a Google engineer who maintains his own blog often talking about Google’s competition, marketing strategy and technology. Occasionally, Matt talks about the calculation and significance of PageRank. Needless to say, many SEO gurus study his blog trying to read between the lines and figure out how PageRank is computed and used. Recently, Matt wrote to answer some frequently asked questions about PageRank. In this posting, he reveals that PageRank is not an integer between 1 and 10 but instead a floating point number in the same range allowing Google a high degree of precision. In addition, he tells us that the number actually exported and shown on Google’s toolbar is in fact only an integer value. In addition, he points out that Google continuously calculates this number and only exports it to the toolbar once every a few months. People often notice that PageRank numbers are changing on the toolbar every 3 months and mistakenly assume that those are the only times that the numbers are actually computed.

Finally, I would like to point out that Matt specifically says that PageRank is considered by Google when a user performs a search. Matt says, “By the time you see newer PageRanks in the toolbar, those values have already been incorporated in how we score/rank our search results.” Some people have questioned as to whether Google still uses PageRank in their search engine algorithm. They claim that it only exists to sidetrack SEO experts with malicious intent. Matt’s sentence claims that Google still uses PageRank in ranking search results reinforcing the belief that it is still relevant; the actual importance of PageRank, however, is hard to establish and as Google has said in the past, the results presented to users are the product of a very complex algorithm with many parameters including PageRank.

My advice to webmasters is to have a link strategy and try to gain a healthy PageRank value. I would not recommend that people obsess over PageRank and instead focus on content. Good content will force other websites to link to yours helping you improve its PageRank. Be very careful of SEO companies that promise you many riches if you are willing to pay them a hefty sum of money to improve your site’s PageRank. Increasing this one number by itself is not likely to have such a large effect. Original, fresh and keyword content is still the best way to achieving success online.

How to Get Backlinks to Boost Your Page Rank

admin — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 15:18:17 +0000

Backlinks are links that are directed towards your website. Backlinks are important for search engine optimization because some search engines, especially Google, will give more credit to websites that have a good number of quality backlinks, and consider those websites more relevant than others in their results pages for a search query. Backlinks are also called inward links, in links, inbound links or incoming links. Backlinks are the building block of good SEO.

Web designers and firms have been practicing this for years, outside of blogging. Website marketing is more dependent upon backlinks. Building backlinks however, can be a slow and tedious process every site owner and blogger has to face. When you are building a quality web-page, it’s important to build quality backlinks that are relevant to the theme of your site. Having your website, blog or Hub rank high with search engines is a key part to any online success, and backlinks are a crucial part of that success.

We constantly find information on the web telling you to “write quality content”, “get involved with social networking”, “and establish relationships with readers and other bloggers”. If you actively wish to increase the backlinks to your site and keep on the right side of Google, Yahoo and the other search engines, make sure you seek out the websites and blogs that complement your own website.

One of the very best methods of gaining backlinks is via the blogging community – when you read someone’s blog, you usually have the option to leave a comment. This is where you can leave a link to your website or blog for other people to check out – to really maximize this type of traffic, have your comment offer some kind of tip or advice on the preceding blog post.

Article marketing is known as the white-hat way to create these relevant, inbound links. Among the acceptable ways of building quality backlinks are getting listed in directories, posting in forums, blogs and article directories. Common ways to get backlinks include exchanging links with other sites (reciprocal links) and by placing articles you write in article directories and on other sites. Another excellent way to get links to your site is by writing articles for newsletters, which are then published on other people’s sites.

To increase your knowledge on search engine optimization and backlinks, you an easily click on any SEO site which will explain the process, in detail, and how you can increase traffic to your website. In the search engine optimization (SEO) world, the number of backlinks is one indication of the popularity or importance of that website or page (though other measures, such as PageRank, are likely to be more important).

Building quality backlinks is extremely important to Search Engine Optimization, and because of their importance, it should be very high on your priority list in your SEO efforts. Many pages concerned with search engine optimization have mechanisms to discover how many backlinks the web page or website has, so that the site owner can not only know the exact number of times that it has been backlinked, but where these backlinks are coming from, and if they are from related sources or not.

Backlinks are the backbone of good SEO, right up there with content and your TITLE and META tags. They are a great way to build your web presence and, are actually rated by the various search engines by keywords and the content of the backlinked sites. Using backlinks is a great search engine optimization technique though, as long as the backlinks are genuine and are not an attempt to fool the search engine algorithms. Ideally backlinks are web pages with high PageRank, with content like yours and that already link to other web pages.

How to Get 100 Free PR Backlinks

admin — Mon, 09 Nov 2009 15:17:49 +0000

The importance of generating backlinks to increase Page rank can not be emphasized any more, it is absolutely mandatory. Once you start your backlink building campaign, you will find that it can be a difficult task if you don’t know which direction to take.

The traditional way to acquire backlinks is to search the internet for websites with a high PR that share the same or similar interest with your own and ask them for a reciprocal link. A reciprocal link is an link exchange between two website owners where each party agree to place each others links on their websites. The problem that occurs when searching for reciprocal links is, if you are just starting out, then your page rank will probably be zero. Most sites that are already established do not gain any incentive to exchange links with you.

The other alternatives to finding established sites to link is to get a little creative in order to build some backlinks. We all know that Web 2.0 social networking sites have bombarded the internet, but what most people do not realize is that they are a great source of high Pr backlinks. You can set up an account with several networks, submit a blog with a link to your website and voila!; you have created a quality backlink to your website.

Another source for acquiring backlinks that usually goes unnoticed are RSS feeds. You can use RSS feed for a variety of reasons. One reason is to receive great exposure for your website or blog. Once you submit your website to an RSS Feed Directory your feed can be subscribe to by numerous readers, thus creating great exposure for your website. RSS feeds are also a great backlinks tool, you can not only generate backlinksevery time your RSS feed is subscribe to, but you will also get free backlinks from each RSS feed directory you use to submit your website.

For best results submit to about 15 directories at a time to spread the amount of traffic you will receive. Spreading your traffic will also help with you Google ranking. The search engines rank websites with consistent traffic higher. You also do not want to generate too many backlinks too fast, as to not raise any eyebrows with Google.

Backlinking Your Way To Online Success

admin — Sun, 21 Jun 2009 15:16:50 +0000

Back in the “old” days of a couple of years ago, search engine optimization (SEO) was all about keywords. Repeat the same phrase fifty times on your homepage and your site would pop up when that phrase was searched in Google. Thankfully for consumers and entrepreneurs alike, the search engines have wised up to such practices. With the creation of more detailed and precise algorithms, Google has come up with better ways to highlight the most relevant and trusted websites.

Just Because You Build It…

Creating a beautiful website with groundbreaking information does not guarantee high site traffic. Once the website is ready to be unveiled to the public, it is time to begin a serious marketing campaign to attract the eyes and ears of interested consumers. The best way to get this kind of exposure is to rank high in the search engine results pages (SERPS), and the best way to climb in the SERPS is to build backlinks.

Backlinking to Your Site

A “backlink” is a link from a website that leads readers back to your website. Sometimes it is a highlighted link in the middle of an article. In other cases, it may be the link in your Resource Box, at the end of an article you have written. When that article is distributed and published on other sites, the link leads readers back to your site.

The importance of backlinking can’t be over-emphasized. When a backlink to your web site from a popular and relevant site is created, Google tags a date to it, and records the actual phrase used in the link. Google then saves this information in order to establish rankings.

Getting the Most Out of Backlinks

It’s important to understand that backlinking is more about quality than quantity. The search engines operate under the assumption that not all links hold equal weight, and a backlink (also known as an “inbound link”) from a highly popular or well known site has more clout than a link from your Uncle Ted’s garden photos.

Here’s what Google has to say about how it uses backlinks to determine your page rank:

“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. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves ‘important’ weigh more heavily and help to make other pages ‘important’.”

So while having every member of your extended family create a link to your website from their own sites might be a great way to keep Aunt Alice up to speed, it won’t get you much love from the search gods.

How to Get Other Sites to Link to Yours

So you know how Google uses backlinks to come up with its search engine rankings. You also know that backlinks on popular, respected sites will boost your SERPS. Now the question is: how do I get those sites to link to my site?

Article marketing is an incredibly effective way to do this. When you create informative, unique content in the form of reprintable articles, websites pay attention. Plenty of well-established websites publish content from article marketing databanks, to constantly offer their site visitors fresh information. When one of these sites, or any of their visitors, publishes one of your articles, an automatic link back to your website is included and bingo, a backlink is born.

Distribute more and more articles around the Web, and you gain a steady stream of fresh, highly relevant backlinks over time. The search engines will notice, and you page rank will go up. It’s that simple.

And higher search engine ranking means more eyeballs on your website. Link simple.