| Before learning how to improve your page rank, you must first understand what it is. Google Page Rank should not be confused with search engine listings. Many do not understand what Page Rank is and how it relates to where their website is listed in a search.
In fact, the correct term is PageRank, which is a trade mark, registered by Google. It is a system of ranking individual web pages according to number and type of links that are leading into and leading from the page to other pages on the web. It was developed by Larry Page while at Stanford University, which is the reason for the term ‘PageRank’ that I will henceforth refer to as Page Rank.
The patent for the method is assigned to Stanford University, and Larry Page later met up with Sergey Brin to create Google in 1998. It is only recently that it has been such a prominent part of Google’s algorithm to determine the search engine listing position for specific search terms, and Google now make it clear that Page Rank is a significant part of this algorithm.
It is possible to optimize your internal linking strategy and your external links to maximize your page rank. Every page in your website starts off with a PR of 1. When one page links to another it provides that page with a share of page rank calculated from a specific formula that involves the page rank of that page and the number of other links leading from it. This formula, and how to use it to maximize the page rank for any of you chosen web pages, is discussed in detail in my book Improved Search Engine Rank, or Seocious. The page rank of the page providing you with the link is important, and very many links pages have very low page rank by virtue of the number of outbound links on them. Thus, if you provide a link from your PR 4 site to a PR 6 site in return for a link back, and that PR 6 site has 100 other links on it, you could be losing out
It is important, then, that you are aware of the Google PageRank of every web page with which you are involved in a reciprocal link arrangement. You should then visit that page and count the number of other links leaving it. It is then possible to calculate roughly the share of the PR that you will get. To find the page rank of another web page you will need to download the Google Toolbar, which you can do here: Google Toolbar
The share of the PR of your page that you are giving away can be calculated in the same way. Be careful when calculating page rank, however, since nobody but Google knows what the PR numbers 0 – 10 actually mean. How many links or PR votes does it take to get from PR 1 to PR 2, for example? If this is 10, for example, it might need another 100 to get from 2 to 3, and perhaps hundreds of thousands to reach a PR of 5. Nobody knows and it would be very difficult to calculate from your own page rank and the number of incoming and outgoing links.
All you need to know is that to improve your page rank you should have as many links pointing to your page as possible, and these should ideally be from high page rank pages that have few other links to other web pages. |