You can’t surf for long on the internet without coming across the concept of page rank. In fact if you use a google tool bar like Firefox you can see a little widget with Pagerank displayed for each page you visit. What is Page Rank? Why is it important?
The page rank goes from a scale of 0 through to 10. Most new sites start off at 0 and can stay there unless the operator takes some steps to improve it. Article-Gems at the time of writing this article has a page rank of 3, not huge but not bad for being online 3 months. One of the largest article directories Ezine Articles has a page rank of 6-7, and not surprisingly Google has a page rank of 10.
Page rank is a way Google determines how important a web page is in relation to every other page on the internet. It is believe each step up the scale is significantly harder to achieve. The page rank is normally written up as PR0, PR1, PR2, etc. Sometimes it appears as a green bar.
One way to improve your Page Rank is to have other well-ranked pages link into your site. It’s like a vote for your site by these other sites. However before you go submitting to every link farm out their note that google will penalize you for these types of links. Quality is more important than quantity. It can get quite complicated. For example even if a PR9 site ranks into yours, this may not be as valuable to your site if that PR9 site has a 1000 links. A PR6 site with just one link to your site might be of more value. The number of pages on the site is also believed to be a contributing factor to page rank as well.
So why is page rank important. Because it is one of the factors Google uses to determine where in their search engine results your page will be featured. Obviously keywords and SEO plays an important role, but if there are two near identical pages in every other aspect the one with the higher page rank will be displayed higher in the search results.
With this in mind it helps explain why article directories are so important. By submitting your article to an article directory with links to your site you are creating a vote for your website or blog. Struggling to get your page noticed? Then get busy and start submitting articles. Not only will you get direct traffic from people following your article link you will also be working to improve your page rank.
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{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Hello,
Great article ! It took me two and a half years to learn what you have written.
Understanding PR can be a little complicated if you let it, only because there are so many factors involved.
To many of us focus on page rank rather than quality related backlinks. Auto-submitting, link farms as you mentioned,poor quality websites just to mention a few, are danger zones for us to get penalized. I no longer worry about PR. It will take care of itself. Relative organic linking is the way i have learned to approch back links.
Thanks again for the great article.
Emery C
i used to be a PR fanatic, but then i realized that it’s not so important, at least not the PR shown by the toolbar. i have a website with PR 1 that ranks in front of sites of PR 3, 4 even one site of PR 5… maybe the PR is important, but the PR that only google knows. there aren’t few the cases when sites with lower PR rank better, and that’s because they are better on-page optimized and they are more relevant to that keyword than the other websites
Tym