Home » 2008 » March » Link Popularity, Link Reputation & PageRank
Link Popularity, Link Reputation & PageRank
People use the search engines to (you guessed it!) 'search for things', and the goal of the search engines is to provide the most relevant information. If the information returned is not relevant, the web user will use a different search engine, so it's in the best interests of the search engines to bring back relevant results
At the time of writing, the majority of searches worldwide are conducted on 3 major search engines (Google, Yahoo! and MSN).
These search engines use mathematical formulas called 'algorithms' to evaluate your website's relevance in relation to 'search terms' or 'keywords'. Each search engine uses different algorithms which are not disclosed to the public, but they all focus on 2 main areas: Content and Link Popularity.
The term 'link popularity' as I refer to it, means: 'How authoritative your website is deemed to be by the search engines according to the amount of links you have and the quality and relevance of your links, when compared to the content on your website and your competitors' websites".
The content in your website includes: all text, images, audio and videos.
PageRankâ„¢ is a series of algorithms that was invented by the founders of Google in 1998 and is constantly evolving.
Google's description of Pagerank:
"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. 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 pages that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves 'important' weigh more heavily and help to make other pages 'important'."
PageRank (from now on referred to as PR) works on a scale from 0 - 10, with 0 being lowest and 10 being highest. The higher your PR is, the more authority your website will have.
Other websites that link to you will give you some of their PR (if they have some) and vice versa. A great analogy is that PR is like water. The higher the PR of the website that links to you, the more water that they will give you. However, if that webpage is already giving water (linking) to lots of other sites, they will not give you as much as they would if they weren't linking to so many sites.
The majority of websites will have the highest PR on their homepage, because that's where the majority of their incoming links point to. A website can have a high PR on their homepage, but a low PR on many of their internal pages.
This is why it is important to have "deep links", these are links going to a page in your site other than your homepage.
FAQs:
Do I need to have a high PageRank to get onto the first page of the search engines?
Yes and No. Each of the search engines has different criteria when it comes to listing your website on the first page. It is possible that you could have PR0 and get the first listing. However, this would most likely be only on a non-competitive keyword. If the keyword you are trying to get high rankings on is competitive, usually the top spots go to relevant sites that have the highest PR.
As the PageRank formula is an algorithm, how many links from a PR4 webpage equal one link from a PR5?
The answer to this is kept secret by Google, but many SEO industry experts predict that you would need between 8-10. So it would take from 64-100 PR3 links to equal 1 PR5 link based on PR alone.
However, this is just a vague guideline because that PR5 link could be more or less valuable depending on: how many pages it is already linking to, it's relevance to your website theme, and other hidden factors.
How do I get onto the first page of Google?
Getting onto the first page of Google (and the other search engines) for a particular keyword or keyword phrase depends on 3 factors:
*Content - what your webpage says it's about by its contents in relation to the particular keyword.
*Link Reputation - what other web-pages say your webpage is about (based on the words in and around the links that point to your website) and the determined quality and authority of those web-pages.
*Authority - how important your website is deemed to be based on the amount of links that point to your site and the quality of those links (PageRank)
The position that your site will get depends on the 'score' that it receives based on these factors. Remember that this 'score' is always in relation to a particular keyword.
If your website is about "bird watching", your website can achieve rankings related to this keyword. You won't be able to rank for "bird watching tours" or "bird watching hikes" unless you have that content in your website.
To rank highly in the search engines make sure that the content on your website is optimized well and you have a lot of links coming into your site, preferably with anchor-text that matches the keywords you would like to rank for. Happy Optimizing!
About The Author
Jason Storm is an SEO Expert who teaches webmasters and small-business owners how to increase their search engine rankings by using content optimization and link building strategies. Visit his site http://www.Affordable-SeoServices.com
Previously on SearchEngineChannel
- 5 Tips to Improve Search Rank
- 7 Winning Search Engine Optimization Tactics
- Web Traffic: Is Using Google Adwords The Right Way?
- Social media optimization : A new theme for publicity
- The SEO Website Overhaul - 5 Small Changes for Better Rankings
- Website promotion via Social Bookmarking & Social Networking
- Applying the 80-20 Rule to Search Engine Optimization
- 9 Ways to Increase Website Traffic Using Google Image Search
- Google PageRank Update
- 40:40:20 of SEO
