After I wrote the more basic post on search engines and links, I decided to go into more details about how search engines see linking, search engine rankings and pagerank and Google juice.

Google pagerank

There are actually two definitions of pagerank, but for now we’re going to focus on the pagerank most webmasters of aware of. Earlier on I wrote about search engine optimization links and how search engines use links to determine which websites are important. Google, as king of the search engines, decided to make the importance of a page clearly visible, by creating numerical ranking system.

If you have the google toolbar installed, you can quickly see the pagerank of any page at the top of your browser and should look like this:

Now what is pagerank? It is an easy to view, numerical form of measuring a page’s importance as viewed by Google (only Google, not other search engines).

Note that every webpage (ie. every page with a different URL) has its own pagerank. So even if your homepage is a pagerank 3, your posts may have little or no pagerank (although we’ll go into this later).

The maxiumum pagerank (or PR) any website can have is 10. Now as far as websites go, anything that has a pagerank 5 or above is considered to be a strong webpage. Achieving a high pagerank gets exponentially harder as the scale goes up.

That is, it is very easy to gain pageranks 1-3, harder to get a pagerank of 4-5 and becomes much more difficult to get anything 6+.

Pagerank updates

Now the numerical value Google has for each webpage constantly changes. However, in order to stop webmasters from gaming the system, Google only updates the pagerank bar every so often (they like to keep us guessing so updates range from a few months to over a year).

That means your website could have a much higher or lower pagerank than is currently displayed, but the toolbar may not have yet updated.

Note: The most recent update was the end of July 2008, so your pagerank is likely to be reflective of your website for at least a little while.

One last note about pagerank: Google differentiates between having a pagerank of 0 and being unlisted or banned. If the bar is white and empty, this means the page has a rank of 0. If the bar is grey, the page is unlisted by google or has been banned by google. Placing your mouse over the bar will show either the 0/10 rank or “No information available”.

Note: before you panic, all of your new pages will display as grey bar. Only after a PR update will your greybar pages show the pagerank they’ve earned - my home cash course review has a PR of 0.

Increase pagerank

Pagerank is huge in the webmaster community. It is what webmasters look at when they want to know how good your website is. Many people use pagerank to gauage how successful your site is (thats bogus btw), so learning how to increase pagerank is a priority for most webmasters.

This is how you get a higher pagerank: links. Remember that we said more links means you’re more important. Since pagerank measures importance, more links means higher pagerank.

One major thing I left until now was the quality of backlinks. Right now it sounds like its just a matter of quantity of links. This is completely false. When someone links to you, you gain a small amount of pagerank. How much you gain depends on the pagerank of the linking site. So if a pagerank 4 links to me, I’m getting a lot more pagerank then if a pagerank 1 linked to me (this is what we call Google Juice [OK, Google Juice is a little more complex, but we'll cover this further on]).

So to recap this: getting links from sites with high pagerank will help you get high pagerank. Additionally, you get increase your pagerank by limiting how many links you have on a page. Every page you link to is a page you’re giving your juice to. So if you have 50 links on your page, each page is getting very little juice. By this method, it sometimes is better to get a link from a low PR 1 or 2 page that has very few links than a PR 3 or 4 that has tons and tons of links.

*Note: I felt I should add in: Once your homepage gets a nice pagerank, you’ll be able to spread that across the site. All of your homepage links will automatically transfer pagerank to other posts that display on the homepage.

Either way, we get the highest possible pagerank by: getting links from high pagerank sites and having very few links on our pages.

If you want to link out and don’t want to lose any Juice, add the tag rel=”nofollow” inside the link. So the syntax looks like:

<a href=”WEBSITE URL” rel=”nofollow”>ANCHOR TEXT</a>. This is good for keeping your pagerank and is also good in case you want to keep a link for your visitors to click but don’t want to lose any juice.

Search engine rankings and pagerank

What does pagerank have to do with search engine rankings? Some webmasters seem to believe that having a high pagerank ensures that Google will rank you for whatever keyword you’d like. In some ways, it is true that having a higher pagerank increases search engine rankings.

That’s only because pagerank comes from links and the more links you have the more important Google thinks your page is.

However, the main factor in ranking is NOT the number of links you have. In addition to having high quality links, the anchor text of your links is extremely, extremely important. So when my friend Justin from SEO Zombie is trying to get ranked, it is important that I link to him using his keyword in the anchor text. He wrote an seo guide which is really a page with links to his old post.

Now he can choose the anchor text for all of the linked posts using this post, so he’s helping to increase the juice of all these individual posts.

By contrast, I have a friend who I will call BL. She writes a very funny and entertaining personal blog that has a pagerank of 4. Justin only has a pagerank of 2. But BL’s blog is unlikely to ever show up in the search engine rankings, because all her friends link to her using the keywords “BLs Blog”. Justin gains links with seo-related keywords, so he shows up in the search engine results for these terms.

BL’s friends give her more pagerank with their links, but Justin gets the right anchor text, which means he gets into the search engine rankings and THAT is where the money is.

Search engine rankings and keyword authority

Remember when I first baited Justin in I said that we were “in the perfect position to trade links”? You see, gaining links is not just about pagerank or anchor text, its also about keyword authority. This is the other meaning of Google Juice–getting this stuff means that Google starts to associate your keyword with your site.

So here’s what I mean: let say BL links to me with her blog which has a pagerank of 4. She even uses the anchor text search engine optimization and links to one of my posts in the middle of her post. If you haven’t caught on, this means the link is high PR, right anchor text and looks perfectly organic to Google or any search engine.

Now this will give me some juice for the term “search engine optimization” and any SEO keywords that stem from this. I will also get some pagerank from her link. However, Google takes into account the juice that the original website has. What this means is that BL’s link is NOT perfect.

Because she has no authority for any SEO keywords, the amount of authoirty that I get isn’t as great.

Authority is how you get high search engine rankings, NOT pagerank. So for me to get lots of search engine optimization authority, I need backlinks from sites that have built up authority for that keyword. Now, I’ll take any link I can get since a link coming to my page can never hurt me.

However, I’m going to try to get the perfectly optimized links for maximum SEO effect. Now back to Justin. The reason that I linked to him is that he too is targeting SEO related terms. This means that when we exchange links, we are also giving each other lots of authority for these keywords.

Note: Being an “authority site” and having authority for keywords are two completely different things and will be covered later.

Increase search engine rankings

So the basic question still remains: how do I increase my search engine rankings for my website? Well lets go over some of the basic search engine optimization you need to do:

1. You need to build links to your website. Your links should be coming with sites that have some pagerank (at least 1) and should have the keyword anchor text you want to get ranked for.

The fewer links that webpage has on it, the more juice this page is going to pass on to you.

Also make sure to get links coming from sites that have built up keyword authority for keywords related to yours (a later post will show you how to tell).

2. Limit the amount of outgoing links you have. If you are linking to irrelevent things on your site or someone else’s be sure to use the rel=”nofollow” tag.

3. Link internally to your own posts using desired keywords.

4. Make your links look organic by being in the middle of posts and to different pages of your site (not just your homepage).

5. Build links slowly, getting low PR links first and moving your way up to higher pagerank links (again, making your site look organic).

I think that’s enough for one post. My next post is going to be about search engines and content and a little experiment that I’m actually doing right now.

I hope you’ve learned something about Google pagerank and search engines. Apply these tips to increase search engine rankings and increase pagerank.

Till next time,

MJ

I actually have a big SEO post written, but I decided to do a quick update on a few search engine related things and a good opportunity to learn some search engine optimization.

First of all, I want to talk about an SEO challenge that started a while ago. The challenge was started by a web solutions company known as Busby. The name of the challenge? The Busby SEO challenge.

The rules are simple: whomever can rank the highest on Google for “Busby SEO Challenge” wins $5000. I noticed this contest going a while ago and having been paying attention since.

This is one of those rare opportunities where we get to see SEO at work. Please guys, use this opportunity to learn about getting to the top of search engine rankings.

Think about it–hundreds of webmasters are trying to optimize for a single term. Studying how the top 10 got their rankings is a great way to learn about search engine optimization FOR FREE!

You might be wondering why I didn’t decide to join in. Well there a few reasons:

1. Let’s be realistic here: I’d have to beat some of the best SEO experts out there–the odds of which are slim. To jump start your Busby SEO post, you’d be better off using a PR 5+ Authority site that will easily pass huge amounts of authority to your post. The only site that I have like that have nothing to do with SEO, which brings me to…
2. Google bait. This competition boils down to one thing: getting anchored backlinks with the term “Busby SEO Challenge”. This means everyone is calling in all the chips and using their entire link network to get links. To me, this rubbing Google bombing in Google’s face…not something I’d reccomend.

All SEO experts are calling in their chips right now, so it’s a good time to be giving out favours. What goes around comes around and there are plenty of big sites looking for perfect anchored links right now.

The reason I decided to blog about this now was that the webmaster of MyTradeDomain told me that he was participating in the Busby SEO Challenge. Well the interesting thing is that he started the contest late and has less backlinks than anyone else, but is still ranking in the top 10.

How does he do it? His website is a pagerank 5 authority, so his site is getting plenty of Google love.

Best search engine rankings

There is one thing I wanted to point out about the SEO challenge–most of the top sites are teams. That’s because getting to the top of search engine rankings is all about anchored links (as shown in my home cash course post)

5 people can get way more anchored text links than one, so why not pair up?

This is the point I’m trying to make–the real way to top the search engines is to build yourself a link network. Back when I was talking about search engines and links I baited Justin from SEO Zombie to this site. That was my first step in creating a link network.

All those at the top of the SEO challenge rankings have created a network of friends who understand SEO and will give each other perfect, keyword anchored backlinks.

This is exactly what you need to do.

Now I was going to talk a bit about my new project which shows people how to make extra money and the changes to the ebay partner network, but we’ll save that topic for another day.

Use the seo challenge to your advantage! This is a free way to learn seo and increase your search engine rankings!