Roy Hunter

July 27, 2009

www.MyMarketingCompany.com

I have been following a lot of forums lately and one of the things I have noticed is many posters, and surprisingly some SEO providers, really do not understand what Page Rank is.

The common misconception seems to be that Page Rank is your placement or ranking in search results. Page Rank does have an effect on ranking higher in search results but not the location of your website within those results. Page Rank is the overall value placed on your page by Google and that value gets passed to the pages you are linked to. It is still possible to achieve high placement in search results with a Google Page Rank value of zero.

Over time Google will place a value on your page based on its popularity and perceived authority. This value is is then used to determine the value of pages you are linked to. The theory is; quality sites will link to quality pages and this is how Google differentiates quality websites from questionable ones and assists them in removing spam sites from the search results.

I saw a blog post by Danny Sullivan in reply to a post made by Matt Cutts. Mat Cutts is the head of Google’s Web spam team and he  basically sets the standard for what Google indexes and deems valuable content.

In Matt’s blog, Danny Sullivan provided a very simplistic example how Page Rank works by defining it as a $ value. Each web page has a value, maybe $5, maybe $10, etc. If you have 5 links on your page and your page is valued at $10, each link has the ability to spend $2 of that value and transfer it to the page it is linked to. The linked page now gets a value of $2, if that page has 4 external links, each link is worth $.50 and transfers that value to the linked page and so on.

That is an overly simplistic definition of sharing Page Rank value as Google ultimately determines the value of the link based on the type, location, some links are worth more, some are worth less. But you get the general idea.

To get Page Rank you need to have links to your website on Page Ranked sites, when websites with Page Rank link to your site and “share” some of their value, the Page Rank value of your site will increase. Page Rank is also given by Google as a result of the number of  inbound links to your website regardless if they are from Page Ranked sites or not. You can gain page rank from links in social sites,  forums and blogs, as well as links from media companies such as local magazines that are promoting your website as a result of advertising with them. The more links you have pointing to your website, the more Page Rank your website will receive from Google.

Consider your Page Rank as money in the bank. Choose to spend it wisely. Each page you link to will get some of the value that has been placed on your page. A good rule of thumb is to only link to quality pages with a trusted authority. If you are not sure about the quality of the website you are linking to, you should define in the HTML code of your website instructing the Google bot to not follow that link. If you are confident the page is a authority, or quality website then by all means link to it. Google likes quality websites to share their value with other quality websites.

Here is an example of a “nofollow”  link for an untrusted link within a web page you can use to adjust your code:

<a rel=”nofollow” href=”http://www.THELINKSWEBSITE.com” target=”_blank“>Anchor Text</a>

That will open the page in a new window, use _self in place of _blank if you wan the link to open in the same page.

Now I am sure some of you SEO savvy developers who have used link sculpting in the past to enhance the value of interior linked pages to preserve Page Rank may disagree with me about sharing page rank freely between worthy sites, if you have been paying attention, Google has made a fundamental shift from it’s stance on “link sculpting”.

If you would like to learn more about the update that Google has implemented and learn more about the practice of Link Sculpting do’s and dont’s you can read Matt Cutts blog here:

Matt Cutts Blog

If you would like to begin a forum discussion on the subject you may do it here:

Free Marketing Forum