Google Page Rank Explained

It is becoming increasingly common knowledge that what you need to get your site high in the rankings of search engines is lots of links pointing at your site. Links have different values however, some are worth more than others. You could rank higher than a site with 20,000 links pointing at it with just 3000 links pointing at your site if all your links were 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.

Every page that Google can see will receive a Page Rank (PR) from 0-10, 0 being the lowest and 10 being the highest. This will not happen immediately because PR is only reviewed once every 6 months or so. Achieving a PR of 10 is almost impossible unless you have a very large, very popular corporate website, like apple.com, but even that is only a PR 9. Some pages have a PR of n/a and this can mean several things, one that the page is younger than 6 months and Google hasnt ranked it yet, or because its an unimportant page deep in a site, or because Google has detected something it doesnt like on that site and blacklisted it.

So what benefits does a high PR present? Well, if you can get a link from a PR 6, 7 or even 8 site, then that will have a much bigger effect of your sites results ranking than a link from a PR 1 or 2 site. PR is basically, how valuable, important, up to date and genuine Google thinks the content of a page is and links basically count as votes to say that a site is worth visiting. So if youve got a PR8 site telling Google that your site is worth visiting (i.e. linking to you) then Google will start to favour your site much more.

A common misconception in the SEO world is that Google PR directly helps you get higher in the results rankings. The truth is it doesnt. It is extremely valuable however because once you start achieving good PR, people will want links from you, and because the link you will be giving them is of high quality, you can request a high quality link back.

When you first start trying to get some PR for your site, you will be faced with what is almost a catch 22 situation in that the main way in which PR is achieved, is by getting quality links. However, people will be unwilling to give you and quality links until you have some PR to give them a quality link back. So to start with, it is rather a long process.

A good way to start your campaign for high quality links is to find sites like yours, not necessarily theme related (although this does help) but sites that are relatively new and are eager to get links. These sites will be a good starting point for your linking because in six months to a years time these sites will have some PR (probably no more than 2 or 3 but thats still well worth having) and so in the long term will be highly beneficial to your sites search engine rankings, and your PR, meaning you can start exchanging links with higher and higher PR sites.

Links are not the only thing that count when building PR, something else that we know counts towards it is how often the content is updated. Content that is updated on a regular basis hold far more weight with Google than content that is left the same.

The reasoning behind this is that if a site has fresh new content every week or every fortnight or so, then the information will be the most up to date and relevant to modern times as opposed to a site that has had the same content on it for a year. Google wants to give people the best, most up to date information related to what they are looking for. If you bear this in mind when starting a PR campaign, along with the correct linking methods, you cant go far wrong.

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