Friday, June 12, 2009

An Explanation Of Google PR

By Jorjeo Iveniscovich

It is a well known fact in the world of webmasters that you need lots of links in order to rank well in the search engine results pages. But no all links are worth the same, you can have 3000 links and rank higher than someone with 20,000 if your links are from sites 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 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.

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.

The catch 22 of the whole PR game is that in order to get good PR, the main thing you need, is high quality links, but until you have a high PR page yourself, other high PR sites will be unwilling to link to you, and so thats where you have to apply a bit of knowledge.

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.

There are other things that are taken into account when Google calculates your PR. Obviously nobody knows all of them except the people who develop the system, otherwise everyone would manipulate it to give them good PR, but what we do know is that sites that are regularly updated with fresh new content hold far more sway with Google and other search engines than sites that are left for long periods of time.

This is because the content will appear to have gone stale after a while; after all, news wouldnt be news if it was old! Google likes to be able to give its searchers the most up to date and relevant information it can, and so sites that are regularly updated will be given preference.

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