In a world where a lot of people maintain blogs, it is quite common to hear them talk about PRs and whine about how their sites suddenly got downgraded from a PR3 to a PR2. If you are one of those netizens who use the Internet just to surf, chat, Facebook, Tweet and watch videos, all that talk about PR may sound Greek to you. However, if you have plans of getting into blogging and making something out of it, understanding what PRs are all about is just one of the many things you need to do.
PR refers to a site’s PageRank, a proprietary system created by search engine giant Google to rank the importance of a web page. Developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google, Google PageRank works with the theory that the Internet’s most important pages are those with the most number of links leading to them. In a way, a PageRank basically treats links as votes. The more votes or links from other pages a site has, the higher its PR would be. Google PageRank uses a scale of one to ten in assigning PageRank, with ten being the highest.
Other Factors Considered by Google PageRank
Aside from the links, PageRank also takes other factors into consideration, including:
- The PR—importance, so to speak—of the site or page that carries the links. Simply put, a link from a site with high PR has more weight than one from a site with lower PR.
- The number of links on the page that placed the link to your site. The more links a page has, the lesser its weight. This is due to the assumption that pages with so many links tend to be more indiscriminate in handing them out.
The Importance of Google PageRank
To be clear, Google PageRank is just one of many factors that determine the importance of a certain site or page. Still, it is important to many bloggers and anyone doing search engine marketing in the web because:
- It provides them with vital statistics that help them check if their SEO strategies are working or not.
- It helps them know how important other pages are, and this comes into play when they are in the middle of a link exchange campaign. Given the system’s principle of giving more weight to links from pages with high PR, webmasters would want to ask for links from sites whose importance to Google is clearly indicated in the Google Toolbar.
Tips for Improving Your Site’s PR
While there is no exact science for improving a site’s PR, doing the following appear to work for many webmasters:
- Come up with unique, relevant and quality content that other webmasters would want to link to.
- Conduct aggressive link exchange campaigns. Just make sure you are not linking to link farms, which are sites that are nothing more than a collection of random links to random websites.
- Update your site or blog on a regular basis.
- Register your website to many different web directories.
- Comment intelligently on other relevant blogs and get back-links.
Truth be told, many webmasters do not really obsess over their site’s PageRank. Although they recognize its importance, they understand that it is just one of many ways to build a successful website. Many believe that by simply building a good website, they can attract visitors with or without PageRank.
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