Linking and PageRank – Counting Votes

Page Rank is a benchmark of how Google views a site. It is supposed to be representative of its value to the visitors who find it in search.. Many different factors and variables can apply, to how your PageRank is determined, but there are a few rules of thumb that hold true for nearly any site.

This refers back to you are known by the company you keep. The ‘neighborhood’ analogy is still a great way to say it; if you set up house near sites that have a high Page Rank, your home (site) will be worth more too.

Linking from site with high Page Rank is one of the top game plans to quickly increase PageRank, but this is not always easy. The more outbound links a site has, the more their Page Rank may decrease, so you have to come up with a good, solid reason for them to want to link to you.

Excellent content is the number one answer to this! We keep hammering that point home in every other blog post, because it’s true! Consumers surf the web for what? Information. If you can supply the best information on a given subject, displayed, organized and formatted for maximum ease of use, then you have produced a product that sells itself. All you have to do is get it in front of the correct audience.

Sometimes you can send a sample of your content to you’re the site you want a back link from or offer to provide a page or two of relevant content for their own site in exchange for a link. This can be very effective if you write your own content; you can make a trade of your services and you might think about offering to guest blog on relevant niche blogs, too.

Another way to increase credibility is outbound links. We are discouraged from excessive outbound linking, but if you have an outbound to a relevant (hear that? Relevant!) site with an extremely good Page Rank, this won’t hurt you. It might even provide a tiny boost to your own score.

A link to another page is basically a vote. In the world of the internet, all votes are not equal. One vote from a site with high Page Rank is worth twenty votes from pages with none. It’s like the electoral system; the highly ranked sites are delegates, who have already received their votes based upon their qualifications. If you can secure the support of a delegate or two, you can become serious contender.

Of course, votes from a ballot stuffer do you no good in the long run, and might even get you busted for illegal practices. Stay away from sites with lots of outbound links; fifteen outbound links is about the highest number you want to see on a prospective backlink source.

When you start link-building, stop and look at what you are linking from. Your links should come from well respected sites. This way consumers and search engines will view your site as valuable as well.