Netalot

Google, the mighty search engine, has devised a rating score from 0 to 10 to rank blogs and sites on the internet. This is done through it’s algorithms. For the layman that means that Google has written software that sends out bots, short for robots, that snoop around the cyberspace to provide a link analysis back to the company.

Google keeps the make up of this software very close to its chest. This means that internet marketers, and especially those that pass themselves off as experts within the search engine optimisation field, have to constantly be aware that Google could be changing the way it allocates ranking and importance.

Most web site owners are paranoid about their Google ranking. By knowing your page ranking will help you to make the changes or additions to your site to improve your content and value to not only Google but to those other web sites that potentially link to your site. As almost every writer about Internet marketing or SEO will agree that great CONTENT and FRESHNESS are key to your overall success on the Internet. Get Ranked!

Google itself says that PageRank relies on the democratic nature of the web. In other words, if too many people find loop holes in the system to hoodwink the bots then Google’s developers rewrite the algorithm to counter these efforts.

This algorithm, named after one of the founders of Google Larry Page, assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents such as the World Wide Web with the purpose of measuring its relative importance within the set.

In reality this means that besides the actual ranking a site will get, each page no matter what the size within the site or blog is also allocated a PageRank.

For instance a blog might have an article that is particularly popular and has received many visitors and backlinks from other sites. On the other hand there could be pages that have a far lower PageRank because nobody visits them.

Knowing this point is relevant when you are trading links with other sites. Make sure that they position that link on a similarly rated PageRank page as you are. Don’t give away space on your prime real estate such as your front page when your link is getting tucked away on some remote low PageRank rated page.

The PageRank of the links is more important than the number of links. Google definitely prefers quality to quantity. Hundreds of minor important sites linking to you are not as important as the few higher ranked sites that might also be linking to you.

Google is constantly on the look out for PageRank undermining strategies such as the set up of link farms. Besides allocating penalties to sites linking to these, Google states that a site cannot help who links to them.

Penalties are not awarded for links coming in. However, links going out will be examined for their harmfulness. Linking to a site with a PR0 could be harmful as this site could have been awarded the zero ranking as a penalty.

Google is known to actively penalize link farms and other schemes designed to artificially inflate PageRank. How Google identifies link farms and other PageRank manipulation tools are among Google’s trade secrets.

When deciding on your niche and you have identified your competitors check their PageRank and the PageRank of the links going to their site. You can do this with an SEO Competition tool which will allow you to check for PageRank backlinks and will provide you with information that might warn you not to compete in that space. If your competitors have backlinks from sites ranked 6 for instance you will have an uphill battle to compete in this space.

There are many reasons to be aware of the PageRank of your site or that of a competitor. It’s important to learn the significance and ensure that you learn the basics so that you can plan your web marketing strategy.

You must remember that search engines are always trying to improve the way they work in order to provide better search results for their users (ie customers). A search engine wants to make sure when a user enters his or her search terms, the search engine will turn up the results they want. If you keep this in mind and provide quality content I am very confident that will also improve your PageRank.