Page Rank Improvement

In terms of getting traffic to your blog, Page Rank Improvement is equally as important as ensuring that your web page is search engine optimized (at least to a minimum level: see: How To Get Traffic To Your Blog), perhaps more so. Judging by an interview with Matt Cutts, a Senior Engineer at Google, (or he was in 2005 and as far as I am aware he still is – who would leave Google probably the best employer on the planet?) this is the case.

Lets think of the basics: Google is a highly profitable business based on internet use. Internet use is founded on the fact that it is a useful service. The more useful it is the more it grows and so does Google and Google’s profit. It is that premise that underpins Google’s concept of Page Rank, which in turn is based on quality inbound links (backlinks). Sites that are the recipient of quality inbound links are good quality sites providing a useful service. Thus is what Google wants more of. And so do we and all internet users.

Here are two questions asked of him (from the website: http://www.seroundtable.com and reproduced under a creative commons license):

Question: Let's go back to text links.
Answer: Best links are earned, not sold or traded. You may not get what you pay for. He said, if someone is selling text links, they should give you a free test trial to make sure it works. They have both manual and algorithmic approaches to detect paid links. He said Google.com gets emails asking to trade links. The guy who came up with the pixel homepage thing, that was creative.

Question: Do you use the toolbar to figure out what to crawl and how often?
Answer: Nope. Its all pretty much based on PageRank.

OK, what does this mean? Answer: that inbound links are very important as it improves what Google call Page Rank. This, as I understand it, is a measure of a website’s worth or value on the internet. It is measured by the number of inbound links. This means the number of other sites referring to your blog by linking to it. By far the best links are those occurring naturally and voluntarily because these are genuine and “real” i.e. not bought or exchanged.

It is claimed, in the answer above, that Google can differentiate between “real” high value links from good Page Rank pages from bought links and there are a lot of online businesses selling high value links. These are links from web pages that have high Page Ranks. A high Page Rank is one above 3 (PR 3 or better is the target and the higher the better).

The more high quality naturally occurring inbound links you can get pointing towards your blog the better. If your blog (and web pages on the blog) have a decent PR, Google will favour it in listing pages (with decent PRs) higher in search result listings (note: this concept is disputed by the author, “Enviroman” - username, of the blogger tips and tricks site). Page Rank improvement ultimately comes about by writing good original content. That is the core of any website. And it is not really of any great value to simply regurgitate other people’s stuff. It is best to have an opinion, good or bad! One point worth making is that it is possible to provide your own inbound links, legitimately, by writing articles for other sites (article sites) and embedding links in those articles. The site that gains the most from this is the article site, however. Another way is to get listed in high page rank directories. These are good starting points. I wouldn’t listen to people who promote the idea that you can get instant thousands of backlinks (inbound links). This is not real and the Google algorithm will, I believe, spot this. It may even go against your blog or other website.

Once I did buy some inbound links but I stopped the process mid-stream as I realized the only way is to keep building good content, publicizing the website and using SEO as best as I know how. These are the three planks of success on the internet and the fourth flows from them: Page Rank Improvement.

Note: Anyone who leaves a comment of ten lines can leave a link to their site in the comment. While this page is the home page that means an inbound link from a PR 3 page.

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