SEO | Google PageRank & Links For SEO Explained

Google PageRank & Links For SEO Explained

April 30, 2008 By: Justin | 5 comments

So, lets get started talking about off site SEO factors. Basically, these are links. This is a great time to discuss links because Google is currently updating their published pagerank [the PR you see on your toolbar]. About 3-4 times a year, Google takes a snap shot of PR for all sites and updates these published values. Understand that PR is always changing and this is just a snapshot in time. We’ll lets not get ahead of our self. We need to talk about what PR is.

A simple answer: Pagerank is a numerical value between 0 and 10 that rates a site off its importance to Google.

Longer simple answer: Pagerank is a linear algebra matrix / sum calculation that looks at links coming into and out of your site and various other factors associated with those links. Then, they try to determine the probability that someone might find you site through random clicking. All this calculation generates a democratic web where links become votes from one site to another. The more links a site has pointing at it, the more votes it has, the more popularity. The more links, the more likely a person is to randomly find your site. So in conclusion, Google sees sites with more links as more important. PR is a measure of your site’s importance, and Google ranks you on a 0 to 10 scale.

Why Is Pagerank Important

Pagerank is a basic measure that Google provides us with that tells a sites authority, trust, and link popularity. Its a measure of a site’s quality as well as a measure of their linking power. Anyone interested in SEO and internet marketing find PR to be very important. We want to obtain links for relevant high PR sites. If we find a page with high PR, and its related to our site, we’d kill for the link and will work hard to obtain it. A link from a high PR carries more authority. It takes many low PR links to obtain a PR 1 or PR 2, but the same PR 1-2 could be achieved easily with a few solid links from PR 3 sites.

Quality or Quantity

Well, technically both, but quantity KILLS. You want a MASSIVE amount of links. You can beat out high PR links with pure LINK VOLUME. The perfect situation is many high PR links from sites that are related to your site.

Basically, its all about diversification. You want to obtain as many high PR links as possible, but they’re difficult. In addition, you want to generate thousands of crappy PR 0 links coming into your site.

Links Get You Paid

At the end of the day, link building is the bulk of of what I do. I sit and just build links for my many sites. Yes on site is important. You need to optimize for bots so they understand your page. But, on site is useless if you don’t get search bots crawling all over your site. You want them to find your links everywhere and constantly visit your site. So after you get your site up, all optimized, and ready, it is time to build links. Drink coffee. Build Links. Grab Lunch. Build Link. Take a break. Build Links. So see why SEO’s charge so much? They’ll sit for hours/days using every trick they know to generate your site as many links as they can.

So, if you take nothing else away from this post. Please take this.

To Be Successful At SEO, You Must Build Links,
And When You Think You’re Done, Build Some More!!

Links Are Not Created Links

A link is a link. Yes. Get EVERY link you can. But some links are better than others.

Google Juice Link Factors

Do Follow or No Follow

Google made this in reaction to search engine spam. The nofollow link attribute tells Google to not pass authority with that link. It allows you to link to a site without passing a vote or associating your site with them. So nofollow links are generally considered to be useless links in terms of gaining authority through back links.

You will see nofollows used on many blogs across the internet in attempt to cut down on blog spam. There are however many blogs who remove these,and turn their blogs into do follow.

A no follow looks like this:

<a href=”http://url.com” rel=”nofollow”>Anchor Text</a>

Notes about NoFollow

  • Google some times follows them by mistake and counts them. It’s not 100%
  • It doesn’t mean Google doesn’t see your site. Nofollow is not a “block”, but just an instruction not to assign a “vote”.
  • Not all search engines use nofollow. Yahoo ignores them.

So, when looking for links. You want dofollow, which is a link without the nofollow. Most blogs are nofollow. Some social networking sites are nofollow.

Nofollow can be used to control internal page authority, but I will cover that later.

PR

Pagerank is the next big factor when getting a back link. What is the pages PR?

This is simple, higher is better! P4 > P1

Related Content

You want the site to be related to your site. You want to obtain links from sites in the same niche or community as your keyword. These don’t have to be exact keywords, but can be related. Like McDonalds and Hamburger. Internet Marketing and SEO.

Page Age / Domain Age

How old is the page? When was it listed by Google? How old are the links pointing to it? How old is the domain?

These are all factors. Simply, the old, the better.

Relation to YOUR Site

Not only is relation noted, but also how well related your site is to the site linking to you. Related is better than non-related, but within related, there are degrees of relation. The more related, the better.

Anchor Text

This is the keyword for which the authority is passed. You will be passed juice no matter what word you use, but you gain authority for the word you use. If you obtain 500 links to your site for your name. You will rank for your name, but not as high for your keywords.

You want your keywords in the anchor text.

Surrounding Text

Google is smart enough to determine between different types of links on a page.
Where is the link?

  • In content, surrounded by words related to it
  • At end of post or content
  • In comments
  • In footer
  • On side bar, alone, with 5 other links, with 50 other links

Each of these appear differently.

The best links are in content. Or, a site wide link that isn’t bunched with a lot of other links.

One Page or Site Wide

If you do a link exchange, is the link coming from one page or is it a site wide link exchange? A site wide will give you a link from every page on their site. A site wide link is better.

Page Out Going Links

Every page only carries a limited amount of authority it can give out. It divides this between the number of links leaving a page. A page with 5 links will pass more authority per link, than a page with 150 links.

The Best Link

  • Dofollow link
  • Off a high PR page
  • Related to your site
  • Has been on the net for a long time
  • Has content closely related to the page on your site
  • Uses your keyword as anchor text
  • Few out going links

From there down, links pass varying degrees of authority.

Conclusion

So, that is the basics of Pagerank and passing link authority. I will return to the topic of links a few more times because they’re very important. I need to cover specifically internal linking and deep linking, as well as link building methods. I hope this was helpful, no get out there and get some links.

Post is part of our Search Engine Optimization Guide, that teaches basic SEO

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Filed Under Google, Link Building, SEO, SEO Lessons |

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