Improving Your Google PageRank

I suspect the first question you may have is "what exactly is Google PageRank?''

PageRank is Google’s system for ranking web pages. A page with a higher PageRank is considered more important and so is more likely to be listed above a page with a lower PageRank in the Google Search Return.

However, as always, Google is prone to changing the rules. As of October, 2009 Google has quietly eliminated PageRank in Webmaster Tools. Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa explains:

"We've been telling people for a long time that they shouldn't focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it's the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true," says Moskwa. "We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it."
Moskwa points to a FAQ page about crawling, indexing, and ranking, which says that webmasters shouldn't even bother thinking about PageRank as it is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed, and ranked.

Google describes PageRank below:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

In other words, Google conducts “elections” in which each web page casts votes for web pages with hyperlinks to those pages. But unlike a democracy a page can have more than one vote and links from pages with high PageRank are given more weight (according to their ranking) and thus help to improve the targets’ PageRank.

You can see the PageRank of any web page with the PageRank meter in the Google Toolbar. The more green, the higher the PageRank.

How to improve your PageRank

Below are some suggestions for publicising your web and improving its PageRank.

First and foremost you should create content that users want and will share with others.
Then submit your site to various web directories and reference sites.

There are thousands of website directories that specialise in linking to other web sites and categorising those links.

Submit your website’s URL (domain name) to the highest ranking website directories - you can find a list in a Google search. Also post your URL to online reference, e.g., Wikipedia, industry-specific expert sites, blogs, etc.
Publicise your site to everyone you know.

Add your site’s URL, e.g. www.website-consultant.co.nz, to every piece of communication you initiate. Your website address should be listed everywhere that your phone/fax number and mailing address.

* Business cards
* Letterhead
* Newsletters
* Brochures
* Press Releases
* Faxes
* Email signatures

Write a newsletter and send it out.

Inform people what’s new or noteworthy on your site. The newsletter will remind people about your site and encourage them to visit to find interesting content.
Provide a Rich Site Summary (RSS).

RSS is also known as Really Simple Syndication. JISC describes RSS as “a lightweight XML format for distributing news headlines and other content on the Web.”

In addition to making it easy for other sites to distribute your headlines and content, your RSS feed will be indexed by popular Blog search engines.

Ask other high-quality websites to link to your website.
Getting other respected websites to link to yours will help your website’s PageRank.

Provide motivation for highly ranked websites to link to yours.

Getting highly-ranked sites to link to yours will improve your ranking more than getting many poorly-ranked sites to link to yours.

Tell the press about your site.

Keep your website fresh and current with regular updates.

Give away content.

Search Google for your website.

Instead of entering your URL into your browser, search Google for your site. Google is more apt to improve the ranking of a site that users seek and visit than one that gets no traffic from Google.

Avoid devious tactics to improve your ranking.

If Google suspects that you are trying to deceive it web crawler and thus its users by including hidden text, misleading or repeated words, pages that don’t match your sites description, deceptive redirects, duplicate site or pages, or other disingenuous tactics, then Google may delist your site from its index.
And finally…

In addition to considering the number of links to your page and the ranking of the linking page, to compute a page’s PageRank, Google considers hundreds of factors including

* how fast a site is gaining links
* how long the links persist
* when your site acquired the links
* the click through rate (CTR) of Google’s search results, cached pages, favorites on the Google Toolbar
* the stickiness of your site (i.e., the effectiveness of your site in retaining individual users)

Google periodically changes how it calculates a page’s importance, thereby resulting in shifts in rankings, known as a Google Dance. Google Guide’s placement in Google’s search results sometimes changes when Google modifies or enhances their indexing algorithms.