:: Copywriting and Direct Marketing ::

It is no secret that in order to get your website ranked highly in the results pages of search engines like Google, you need to have links pointing at your site, and lots of them. But some links are worth more than others. You can be ranked above a site that has 20,000 links with 3000 if yours are of a better quality.

There are many things that affect how much a given link is worth but the main one that holds the most weight is the Page Rank or PR that Google has assigned the page youre receiving the link from.

Google basically gives every page it finds a rank from 0 to 10. This wont happen straight away because Google only reviews Page Rank (PR) every six months or so. The highest rank is of course, 10 and lowest is 0 however there are some pages that simply have no PR (the PR just reads as n/a) and these will probably be new sites that Google hasnt found yet, or a fairly insignificant page deep in the site, or in the worst case scenario it could mean that Google has blacklisted that site. PR 10 sites are very rarely seen (except google.com) as there are only around 9 in existence.

So what is there to gain from a good PR? Well, if your site receives a link from a high PR site like a PR 7 or 8, then it will massively more beneficial than a link from a PR 1 or 2 site. In essence, what PR is, is how valuable and genuine Google considers the content of your page to be on a scale of 0-10. Each link counts as a vote for the integrity of the page it is linking to, and so if a PR 8 page votes for you then Google concludes that your page must be of high value, because a high value site says it is, and it will therefore push you further up the results rankings.

PR is sometimes misunderstood by webmasters in that they believe that if they have a higher PR, they will rank better in the search engines. This is not true, but a high PR will give you a MUCH better basis for climbing the rankings. Once you start accumulating some reasonably good PR, you will find that lots of people want to get links from you. This will allow you to ask for higher quality links back as the link you will be giving them will be of a high quality.

When you first start trying to get some PR for your site, you will be faced with what is almost a catch 22 situation in that the main way in which PR is achieved, is by getting quality links. However, people will be unwilling to give you and quality links until you have some PR to give them a quality link back. So to start with, it is rather a long process.

An ideal way to start your linking campaign is to find sites that are in the same boat as yours in that they are looking to build lots of links to gain PR. If you can get links from as many of these sites as possible, then in 6-12 months all of them should have at least some PR, meaning that if theyre still linking to you, you will have some PR, allowing you to start trading links with sites that have higher and higher PR.

There are other things that are taken into account when Google calculates your PR. Obviously nobody knows all of them except the people who develop the system, otherwise everyone would manipulate it to give them good PR, but what we do know is that sites that are regularly updated with fresh new content hold far more sway with Google and other search engines than sites that are left for long periods of time.

The reasoning behind this is that if a site has fresh new content every week or every fortnight or so, then the information will be the most up to date and relevant to modern times as opposed to a site that has had the same content on it for a year. Google wants to give people the best, most up to date information related to what they are looking for. If you bear this in mind when starting a PR campaign, along with the correct linking methods, you cant go far wrong.

Originally posted 2009-06-12 04:02:47.