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Google's PageRank is an algorithm that tells you how important a website page is, giving a general indication of how well a website will rank on Google's search engine. A website's PageRank is decided by 500 million variables and 2 billion terms, but you can see a basic form of a website's PageRank by installing the 'Google Toolbar'. The toolbar shows the PageRank of a website by the assignment of a number between 0-10, with 0 being the lowest and 10 being the highest. How is PageRank determined?In simple terms, Google analyzes the amount of links going from one website to another. Having many links to your website is beneficial, but the 'importance' of those websites outweighs the quantity. The importance is determined by their own PageRank. An example is that a link from the BBC website to your own will improve your PageRank far more than 10 links from blogs that were only created a few weeks ago. How can I see what my website's PageRank is?In order to see your website's own PageRank, download the Google Toolbar which has an option to install the tool for showing PageRank. After installation, you will get the PageRank indicator in the toolbar of your web browser. You can then see the PageRank of any website you visit. I don't have a PageRank - why?Is your PageRank bar greyed out? If your website is new, it can take a while to get a listed PageRank. This can be attributed to the highly discussed 'Google Sandbox Effect'. Essentially, Google tries to stop manipulation of rankings by holding back new websites. The theory is that a new website is unlikely to legitimately have many backlinks links within weeks of going live. It takes months and years to establish a website as a trusted source, so Google will not allow a new website to jump the queue! As we tell all of our clients, it is important to be patient when optimising a website (specifically link building). In order to not look manipulative, the building of links should be done over months, not all at once. If you can get a link from an authority website, this will get Google's attention and your rankings should improve quicker after that link is noted. How do I improve my website's PageRank?First of all, the likelihood of you getting beyond a PageRank of 5 is small without a huge amount of work. This is because ranking of between 1-10 is exponential, so be realistic. The BBC website has a Page Rank of 9 and and has almost 4 million backlinks, many of which are from authority websites. The reality is that the 1-10 scale is not showing the full picture, it's just displayed as this so it's easier to view. Getting backlinks is an article on it's own. The simple matter is that if you want to be successful, you can't spend your whole day working on link building. This is why you need to get your website working for you on it's own. Useful articles are great way of improving the amount backlinks. Ensure they are well written and contain up-to-date, fresh information that will draw an backlink from authoritative websites. You'll be surprised by who links to you, we've had local Government websites and major newspapers link to our clients. Do outbound links harm PageRank?Yes. The idea of having lots of backlinks is Google's way of telling that you are an authority on your chosen subject. If you are linking to many other websites you're essentially saying "This website's better than mine, go there instead!" This is why the term 'one-way links' is coveted. Exchanging links are done by many because its the easiest way of getting a link, but Google is wise to this form of manipulation. We would still recommend exchanging links from time-to-time, but ensure the website you are exchanging links with has a higher PageRank than your own. It is absolutely vital to check your website is being linked to, don't just presume it has been done because the other website owner has said so! Check on an ongoing basis that the link to your website is still there too. Many website owners will use sneaky code to link to your website without actually showing it to Google using a coding language using JavaScript. So, you unwittingly are giving a one-way link whilst thinking you are getting one back. If you have exchanged a link, check the page's HTML code for these telltale signs. JavaScript This example shows a link where the website's URL is gathered from an external file that the search engine's spider cannot view. <a href="javascript:document.myform.submit()">Click here</a> Forms Form scripts can contain links that are not followed by search engines as it is not a conventional way of linking. <form name="myform" action="http://www.domain.com/somepage.html"> No Follow Attribute You can set for individual links to have a 'no follow' attribute, quite simply an instruction to search engine's that they shouldn't visit the URL listed. <a href="http://www.domain.com/somepage.html" rel="nofollow">link text</a> You can also set a page to be 'no follow' so any link on the page is affected. This is done through a meta tag in the Head of an HTML document. <META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW"> Legitimate Link Ideally you would provide the code yourself when exchanging links, because it will have the keyword descriptive anchor text that you are after. <a href="http://www.webtacular.co.uk">Search Engine Optimisation Services</a> My PageRank has dropped - why?Google's PageRank is determined by many factors, one is how many pages on the web actually exist. Google regularly re-evaluates all websites - which takes time - so every few months your PageRank may change. It can easily go down if you have stopped link building or working on your website's content. If your PageRank has dropped, give your website a health check. How is your internal linking? Are there any broken links? Updated content recently? Submitted an up-to-date Sitemap to Google lately? Sorting these issues will get your website crawled more often. My sub-pages have no PageRank - why?Google gives preference to a website's homepage as the most important page, which makes sense as the homepage generally has a link to all the important other pages which is beneficial to a user. Likewise, it presumes pages that are in sub-level directories are of less importance. To keep large websites organised, it is necessary to use some some directories under the root, but don't go beyond two or three levels if possible. This is not to say pages within sub-directories cannot achieve a good PageRank, because if they have direct backlinks then they can be boosted, but we have never seen a sub-page outrank a homepage. Put simply, you can't rely on the homepage to boost all of your website's pages. Therefore, don't focus on getting links just to the homepage. If you have many services, separate them into their own pages and try to build backlinks to them individually. Again, also make sure your website is well linked internally. Don't upset the apple cartUsing the Google Webmaster system you can see what websites are linking to individual pages. This should be checked on an ongoing basis. This gives a good indication of what content is popular, and consequently you may wish to update pages in order to improve them further. The worst thing you can do is delete a page which had a decent amount of backlinks! Also, if your website is established and ranking well, don't suddenly change the menu or page names as this can completely destroy your ranking.
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