Before, PageRank was a metric used to gauge a website’s popularity. If a website had more links from authoritative sources, its PageRank soared, regardless of the relevancy of those pages. This made the task of link building quite easy. Any newbie webmaster can just get links every month or two, observe PR improvements, be satisfied, get links again, and so on and so forth.

Now, the situation has changed. If PageRank was updated consistently then, it is randomly updated now. There are even instances where PR is updated every 3 or 5 months, and even in a year or more. This makes data less relevant than it used to be in terms of how your site is measured. When Google does see your PageRank, it could have either gone up or down. Based on experience, the correlation between PR and placement is approximately .07, which indicates that in terms of being a critical metric, PR is relatively low.

With this information, is it safe to discount PageRank when on the lookout for link partners or websites to link to? No. Logically, PageRank still has some value in terms of link building because it was at one point what Google’s algorithm was entirely based on. However, in order to weigh the value of PageRank in SEO, it is necessary to understand how it is used now.

It is important not to totally cross out PageRank. Instead of framing it as a critical metric, let’s consider it a “collateral metric” for your link building campaign. This means that:

• If you want to look for a site to post or buy links to, you can still review the PR. It’s still a perfect measure of a site’s quality. You can view a site that has a high PR as a strong website, but this doesn’t mean you have to decide to link to it.
• It’s also good to check a website’s historical PR. Before deciding to get a link from a site, ensure that the site’s PR is consistent. A site whose PR changes constantly may be prone to link manipulation and not a good site to link to.
• Of course, it is important to review the relevancy of the content of the website you want to link to. It is better to link to a PR0 webpage which has highly relevant content than a PR5 site with irrelevant content.
• Always remember PR is not the sum total of a site. Look at the weight of the site and not merely the PR.

The important thing in running any link building efforts is to not be tied down to one metric. PageRank is a metric that was relevant then and remains important now to a certain extent. However, you need to look at other metrics as well as basis of your inbound linking efforts.

Common Misconceptions About the Link Building Process

•    That you can quantify or set a quota on your links

Acquiring links for your website depends entirely on the keywords you are targeting and the market that you are in. Some sites need less than a hundred links in order to get into the front page of Google’s search engine results. Other sites may have hundreds of links in its pages but still lag behind in the rankings.

The quality of links is what is actually more important here. For webmasters, investing time and effort in acquiring quality and authority links is more important than just hoarding links into their sites. The keywords or phrases are also important here. You can target keywords that can get you atop easily. But there are also others that are very hard to top at. Mixing and matching the number of links with your specified target words is important in achieving SEO success.

•    You can get all your links from inside your website

Internal links are good. Excessive internal linking is not. There is a certain accepted rule that a certain balance in internal and external links is needed to rise on top of the search engine rankings.

You can always use internal links in order to guide your visitors and make them go deeper into your web pages. It increases customer interaction and experience and can even result in your site being a staple in someone’s “must-visit” list. But you can only go as far as that. You will still need a certain amount of authority external links in order for you to achieve SEO success.

•    It takes a certain amount of backlinks to increase Page Rank

Increasing your Page Rank depends on how you develop your website and whether you gain enough authority backlinks for search engines to consider you a respectable source for a certain niche.

Despite this, many will be surprised to find out that a site’s Page Rank do not really matter when it comes to search engine rankings. A PR 3 may outrank a PR 5 website any time of the day. The main thing to focus on your link building campaign is not to achieve these certain numbers but rather to develop your site in a way that will drive customer traffic to it and give you quality backlinks in the process.

The whole link building process cannot be really measured by numbers. Numbers mean a lot but they also differ depending on the website, industry and other things that need considering. It is primarily a process. It does not have a specific schedule, date or deadline. You can not be sure of whether the return on your investment will be satisfactory to you. All of these things are vague when it comes to link building.

But you can always try. You can always put your best efforts forward. If you invest enough time and effort in doing it right then you will surely reap the benefits of the link building process. Different methods can be done in order for you to achieve success. The main thing constant here is the fact that you need to offer a website that is worthy of being ranked on top of the rankings.
 

External Backlinks
Search engine algorithm identifies the value of links to determine the popularity, importance and relevance of a web page. Search engines like Google classify links into two categories: internal and external links. When it comes to the value between these two links, Google puts more weight and consideration to external links than internal links. Although internal links are still important, Google carries out the principle that what others say or think about you is more significant than what you say about yourself. But this doesn’t entail that you can ignore having good internal link structure or disregard improving on your internal links.

Advantages of Backlinks
Definitely, a direct advantage for having a huge number of external incoming links pointing to your site is that the more sites linking to your pages, the more online traffic your site will get and the wider the target audience your site attracts. Link building would be even more effective if backlinks are located in sites that attract high traffic themselves, have high quality content, and are within your industry or niche.

Another advantage of having a high level of backlinks, albeit less noticeable, is that it makes your site more trustworthy in the eyes of search engines. Search engine algorithms regard inbound links as votes of confidence. This means racking up more links increases the level of trust and power behind your site. Trust is an essential force behind any website’s successful search marketing efforts. Building trust with search engines is very important if you are competing for rankings and establishing dominant online presence in the search engine results pages, or SERPs. However, you can only accomplish this if you carefully select the right kind of quality links.

The Right Kind of Links
Always remember that a search engine’s algorithm can discriminate among the links leading to your site. There are good quality links that can greatly contribute to your link building efforts, and there are also bad ones. To become effective in driving more traffic to your site, you have to discern which backlinks can give your site the leverage to rank better in search engines. So how do you determine which links are worth pursing? How can you judge the value of a link?

Link Popularity, Relevance, and Trust
Having valuable backlinks helps your search engine optimization process to progress smoothly because it provides your site the sure-fire path to better ranking opportunities in search engine results pages. A valuable backlink that helps your site climb the SERPs must have high quality. Moreover, gathering high quality links will depend on the level of trust and relevance of the web sites they are found and on the popularity of your links.

Search engines have just recently placed more significance on metrics about an entire domain rather than an individual URL or page, making it now possible for new pages or even sites with very few links to rank highly because they are connected with important, trusted and well-linked-to domains. Based from this, you can see how being linked with certain domains will surely propel you own site to higher rankings. Having backlinks from other domains that have high levels of authority and trust signals search engines that your site is considered a potentially important resource of those trusted sites. Your site will be seen as valuable if your site have links from other valuable sites. Also, attracting links from websites that have content relevant to yours cues search engines to consider your site an influence within your niche or industry, pushing you further to higher rankings.

Link popularity also plays a vital role in boosting your rankings. Basically, if the links to your pages are considered popular and attract a lot of clicks, it also means that your site is considered popular and important by search engines

Anchor Text Relevance
As mentioned earlier, when looking for sites that will link to yours, it is always important to check their relevance to your content. Make sure that the page that links to your site is relevant to the page within your site that you want to link it to. See to it if the other page’s content is related to the keywords in your own target page, especially if that other page uses related keywords in locations that Google finds important. Check for keywords in the following locations of the page that can be accessed through the View Source command: domain and URL, title tag, heading tags, the body of the text and HTML, and the incoming links pointing to the page itself.

Your goal is to check if the page can be considered as relevant by search engine and if it also related to your own page. The relevance of the anchor text is one of the most important elements in determining rankings. As an attribute of links, anchor text is a critical metric that passes ranking value to a page. Furthermore, search engines give more ranking value that can be passed to “exact match” anchor texts rather than target keywords that are just inserted in an anchor text phrase. For instance, if your page contains a comprehensive article on how to maintain cars, and you are planning to get inbound links from a web site selling car care products, you need to check if the page has exact related anchor texts such as “car maintenance,” “maintaining your car,” etc., rather than “These cheap car care products will help maintain your car well.”

Link Juice, Link Equity, and PageRank
In your link building efforts, it is also important to look at link equity and link authority or “link juice.” Link equity is a component of PageRank, which is an important part of off-page search engine optimization. Link equity refers to the number of incoming links to any given page on your web site. On the other hand, link juice or link authority is the underlying value of the links. This is also referred to as domain authority, which describes the measure of importance, popularity, and trustworthiness of any page in a given domain by the search engines. Google considers the domain where you earn your links from as important as the individual metrics of the page passing the link.

These two combined influence PageRank, which is not directly related to how high you’ll rank in search engines. PageRank is a measure of a website’s popularity on a scale of 1 to 10, with PR 10 being the highest. PageRank functions under the principle that a link pointing to a web site is considered as vote or endorsement for that site. The more votes your site gets, especially from sites that have high PageRanks themselves, the higher your PageRank and popularity. To determine the PageRank value that is being passed, you have to identify the innate PageRank value of a page and the number of links on a page. If a page has a PageRank of 8 it can pass on and link out to two other pages, those pages will carry PR4 each. Thus, the more links on a page, the lower the PageRank value it can pass on.

Therefore, to make your site popular, you need to earn as much links as possible from other web sites that have substantial link authority, with sizeable inherent PageRank value, and have pages with less links to maximize the level of popularity and trust your site can gain.

Permanence
It goes without saying that the permanence and sustainability of links also play key roles to your search engine optimization process. Link building is not just a matter of immediate boosts in your page attributes or site popularity; it should also be in line with the long-term sustainability of these effects. The quality of the site where your links are earned from should not only be the focus, but also consider if those links will stay there for a long time. Once your links are gone, the effects are gone as well. It is important to pursue links from a site that’s just longer periods of time as the site and link mature.

Also, try to avoid buying links most of the time since you can only buy them out for a definite period of time. It won’t be worth it since you will just spend more money to renew and maintain your links on a site.

Link Positioning
Links can appear in different locations on a page; it can be on the header, footer, sidebars or in the body of the content itself. However, when search engines analyze a page for different sections, they assign different weights to content or links according to their location. In general, links placed at the top or beginning of the page are deemed more valuable by search engines than links on the footer of the page. Moreover, links that are occur naturally within the main content of the page carries higher value than any location. This means that links placed in articles as anchor texts that lead to your page have more weight than links placed at the end of a featured content. Thus, it is important to place your links at the top/ navigation header of the page or within a paragraph of the main content as much as possible.

Other Link Evaluation Factors to Consider
Finally, you should also take into account the cost of acquiring a link and the probability of acquiring a link. Issues like how much time and effort do you need to spend to earn a certain link must be thought through to become more effective and efficient in your SEO efforts. You should ask yourself: Is it worth it?

Also, you need to be realistic about the likelihood of acquiring a link from a web site. There are other factors that influence the possibility of actually earning a link. Do you have what it takes to earn a certain link? Can you add a link directly or submit it without strings attached? Can you easily make revisions or additions to a linking page? Also, do you have an existing relationship with the owner or webmaster of a certain domain? If you do, it would help a lot.

Beefing up the PageRank He revealed some secrets on how webmasters can practice SEO effectively without inadvertently affecting a website’s visibility in a negative manner. Cutts elaborated on the basics of SEO by starting off with the importance of putting many relevant links on your website. He emphasized that the more links your website contains, the more pages you will get crawled, indexed, and interpreted. This is because of the direct relationship between your site’s PageRank and the number of links it has. A search engine is more inclined to crawl within a website and index its pages if it has a better PageRank. The PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that measures crawl depth and assigns the weight of a website’s relevance in the Internet. To increase PageRank, a webmaster has to create more pages or secure more relevant links for the site.

Duplication Issues Duplicating page contents from other sites or within the website is a no-no; this could distort the site’s PageRank. For example, creating a product description in your business website and resorting to copy-paste methods to distribute it to other venues online like various blogs, forums, and affiliate websites would not improve its PageRank. Duplicated page contents would be repeatedly ignored by search engines and would not help in increasing your site’s search rankings. It would also cost your PageRank if a certain page were also linked to its duplicated page; your website would suffer from link attrition. For instance, putting the product catalogue with the exact product descriptions in the main Products Section of your website and linking it to the About Us section where you have also decided to put the exact same content about your products is not advisable. This is what webmasters call “canonical conflict.” To reduce canonical conflict, it is advised to use a rel=canonical tag on your website when duplicating content so search engines could index the pages without problems.

The Importance of Inbound and Outbound Links Moreover, putting links from affiliate sites within your website would not do any good to your PageRank. According to Cutts, what would beef up the PageRank are the relevant inbound and outbound links that lead to the most significant and commercially valuable pages of your website, the ones that you would want to have better rankings in search engines, such as the site’s home page. After all, search engine optimization is about integrating the appropriate links throughout the website.

Getting the Best Quality Cutts also shared to us another golden rule in page creation: the more, the merrier. The more quality content you put in a page, the more searchable it would be. Ensure your website has enough content; it is always better to have more texts in a page so the search engines could have more content to crawl and index. But of course, do not just put any random material in your pages or spam too many links; make sure they are of high relevance and quality. Other quality criteria that one should not overlook would be the bandwidth, server speed, and the website’s loading time. Factors like whether your website is being hosted on a shared or a private server play important roles. Websites being hosted on shared servers are usually slow, thus the speed and scope of the pages being indexed might decrease. Having a dedicated, private server for a website would deliver faster loading time with more bandwidth at your disposal.

301 Redirect Cutts also pointed out that 301 redirects do not have the same PageRank power. What precisely is a 301 redirect? In HTTP protocols, a 301 redirect is a command that causes the Internet browser to go to another web location. There are also other status codes beginning with “3” that indicate different methods of redirection. A 301 redirect denotes moving the page to a new location permanently and shows the new address of the changed location.

Through the 301 redirect, a webmaster can move the page by changing a part of the page’s address, putting it in a new directory or changing the entire domain name of a website, while leaving a forwarding address. This status code moves a page to another location within a site or a website to an entirely new domain without breaking the link flow to the new address and without dropping the page from the search engine’s index. This also allows search engines to update their records for a page/website, thus transferring the PageRank and inbound links of the original location to the new one. However, Cutts revealed that doing so could not guarantee the page’s PageRank and incoming link preservation. Using 301 redirects from old pages could cause minor decay in PageRank and could break some of the link flow directing to the new destination page.

Proper Site Architecture and Navigation According to Cutts, their search engine prefers to index websites with proper site architecture and navigation. Visible web content should be easily crawled and indexed by search engine spiders. It means that the site possesses qualities that increase PageRank and search engine visibility; such as,

1. having a lot of relevant, quality content
2. cohesive internal links
3. proper keyword placement.

To create highly searchable content, one has to first research on keywords that are relevant and are a commonplace in your industry.

1. The keywords should be aligned and connected to the content used in the various pages of the site as a whole. For instance, if you are planning to use the keyword “chocolate pie”, you have to structure your navigation and create content for other kinds of pies to increase rankings.
2. Your web address should not be an exemption — it is a major factor for web visibility. Your domain name should contain your targeted keyword or a portion of it to enhance search rankings. If your targeted keyword is the example above, you should acquire a web address like “chocolatepiebakers.com.”
3. More importantly, to create fluidity within your website, a webmaster should use internal links. Utilizing numerous internal links to connect the parts of a site altogether would enhance the PageRank of the most valuable pages. It should be understood that while the home page can be the most important page of a site, one should also consider the number of links leaving a certain page and the placement of the links (whether it’s in the main navigation) while structuring the site.
4. Placing the right keywords in the right places is crucial for PageRank enhancement throughout the site. The most important information should be consolidated wherever possible, especially in the home page, so that users could easily see the contents and navigate through it smoothly. Also use relevant keyword phrases related to the topic or product as your links throughout the navigation section. Ideally, your site should have a site map, since this would make it easier for search engine to index your pages.

The Don’ts During his interview, Cutts did not encourage the use of JavaScript links since their search engine could not execute JavaScript completely, therefore, if you created some links using JavaScript, Google could not index them. He suggested a tiered approach that Google would recognize, where you take your page’s PageRank and guiding it to pages that are more effective. Moreover, using paid links or advertisements in your page would not help increase its search ranking. Google and other search engines detect paid links, but at the same time they filter them out to make the playing field fair and square.

• What are Backlinks?

Backlinks are incoming links to a website or URL. They are often used interchangeably with inbound links, incoming links, inward links, and inlinks. In the world of SEO, backlinks, like PageRank, are an indicator of link popularity or importance of a particular web page. The weight that search engines like Google ascribe to quality backlinks when calculating SERP have made backlinks a building block for excellent SEO. Search engines consider pages with a substantial number of quality backlinks more relevant or more important than others when coming up with SERP. Link building is a vital tool that gives Internet businesses direct traffic, better position in the search engine rankings, and more profits. For any link building campaign to prevail and reap these benefits, webmasters or site owners need not rely on merely the quantity of backlinks pointing to their site, but the quality of backlinks as well. The usage of proper search engine optimization techniques and link building methods should take these facts into consideration.

• Quality Matters.

In getting inbound links for link popularity, quality matters. Search engines like Google compute the relevancy of a site based on the importance or relevancy of the backlinks pointing to that site. It is not enough to get as many inbound links as possible; we need to look at the quality of these backlinks. Quality is usually determined by the content of a specific site. When backlinks to your site come from other sites that have related content to your site, these backlinks are judged as relevant by the search engines. However, if these backlinks are from sites with unrelated content, search engines consider them less relevant. The more relevant the backlinks are to your site, the greater their quality. Moreover, there are several factors that influence a backlink’s value. When backlinks come from “high authority” sites, they are highly valuable.

• Importance of Anchor Text

One thing you need to consider in back link building is the anchor text of your backlinks. An anchor text is a description of the inbound link and must contain useful information relevant to the content on the linked page. There are tools like search engine bots that evaluates the relevancy of an anchor text to the content of a given web site. The bottom line is for the anchor text and content to be highly congruent. This will ensure that your web page becomes highly weighted in the SERP rankings based on a given keyword query.

• PageRank and Backlinks

Backlinks are important when we deal with how to increase our performance in Google PageRank. SEOWatch conducted a study to determine exactly how important backlinks are when computing PageRank. They conclude that 67% of PageRank depends on backlinks. This tells us that serious link building efforts require a lot of investment in order to enhance the quantity as well as quality of backlinks to a website. There are several techniques in building backlinks – some are considered ethical, and some unethical.

• Get Them Naturally.

When we say ethical methods in link building, we mean that the link acquisitions are made naturally. Increasing awareness on how search engines operate has resulted to the increasing use of sneaky and manipulative designs by webmasters in order to influence their placements in the search engine rankings. Since search engine algorithms are designed to assign rankings in a democratic manner, tougher measures and quality requirements have been imposed to prevent other webmasters from using unethical methods to gain undue advantage over others. Using sneaky devices like link farms do not only get you penalized, they might get you banned entirely. Search engines look for natural inbound links, which are links that are built slowly over time. There are several techniques to build natural links. Link baiting and using high quality content in order to attract natural links your way are among the most effective ways to improve a site’s link popularity. Site owners can develop natural links by themselves or can hire a link building company to do it for them.

• Backlink Building Don’ts

There are several link building practices to avoid.

1. Link exchange. One of the don’ts in link building is link exchange. This operates as a barter exchange of links. If you put a link to their site, they put a backlink to your site. When involved in link exchanges, you must be wary of the ratio of your outbound and inbound links. If your outbound links outnumber your inbound links, this is a negative sign. Moreover, you must ensure that your link exchange partners are not link farms; if so, you may put your site at risk of being banned from search engines.
2. Suspicious links. Never link to suspicious sites. While search engines do not penalize you for having backlinks from such sites, engaging in a link exchange program with so-called “bad neighborhood” sites would destroy your link building efforts.
3. Acquiring quality backlinks are an important factor to consider in any link building campaign geared at improving search engine rankings and enhancing link popularity. However, it takes more than just backlinks to drive traffic to your site and influence your rankings. The most important thing is to develop a website with high quality content that is useful and relevant to the end user experience.

What is PageRank? PageRank is a numerical value that is assigned to a site for the purpose of measuring its importance or relevancy. PageRank was developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. The concept was inspired by citation analysis conducted on scholarly journals or articles to measure its credibility. The more times a paper gets cited, the more important or credible it is to its peers.

PageRank computes the probability of finding a web page if a person randomly surfs the Internet. Google uses the mathematical formula, PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn)), where: A = Linked Page tn = Linking Page C/(tn) = Number of outbound link on v d = damping factor, normally set to 0.85 Despite its intimidating appearance, the mathematical formula has several implications for obtaining the link popularity of a web site:

1. If a web page links to another page, it is essentially casting a vote in favor of that page.
2. If several pages link to a web page, it means it has more votes and deserve a higher rank.

How does Google assign PageRank? Google PageRank is highly dependent on the quantity of backlinks. An experiment conducted by SEOWatch concludes that the more backlinks a website has, the higher the PR will be. This is logical since the PageRank was designed as a type of balloting system among Web users where site owners “vote” by linking to a particular page to show support. This explains why PR is often referred to as a measure of link popularity. However, because mere reliance on quality of links have made spamming and search engine manipulations a link building tool in order to influence a site’s positioning, Google’s algorithm includes the quality of backlinks associated to a website in its calculation.

If the pages linking to your site have high PR and are considered “high authority” sites, then your page shares a piece of their reputation and improves its link popularity. Google PageRank considers other factors in assigning values to web sites. These include site age, back link duration and back link relevancy. The fact that Google considers back links’ relevancy helps warn site owners: bad sites can harm your overall total PageRank and your link popularity.

Is there only one type of PageRank? There are variations of PageRank used by Google in order to measure importance or relevancy. Google Toolbar PageRank. This feature projects a page’s PageRank as a whole number ranging between 0 and 10, 10 being the highest. In order to restrict and disallow search engine manipulations, the accurate procedure on how Google calculates PageRank is not disclosed. However, there is always stress on the quantity and quality of backlinks to produce higher PR and higher link popularity. Search Engine Results Page (SERP) Rank. Link building campaigns are built around this type of ranking. It returns the actual result produced when a search engine responds to a keyword query.

A web page’s SERP rank is indicated by a link’s placement on the SERP. If the page can be found on the top positions in a SERP, the higher its SERP rank. It must be noted that while PageRank plays a vital part in SERP, a myriad of factors are included in its computation. Any link building campaign should be geared towards achieving the highest SERP ranking for a website or websites. In order to deter search engine manipulation, Spamdexing, and spoofing, as a means of building link popularity, Google is mum on how factors influence PageRank specifically.

What are some tips to improve PageRank? The encouraging thing about being able to understand PageRank is that webmasters, site owners, or a link building company can determine how to adjust some factors in order to optimize PageRank and improve link popularity. A high PR to add to other link building methods will drive you ahead of competitors. There are three basic areas to consider when optimizing PageRank:

1. The quality of links you choose to have link to your site. The link you choose and the effort you put in to acquire them are essential in PR optimization. As explained before, quantity and quality of links are important considerations in PR and link building. Choosing link farms and banned sites to link to you would prove disastrous to PR and link popularity.
2. The site you choose to link out to from your site. In using outbound links, there is one golden rule: ‘Keep PageRank within your site.’ Linking out will decrease your total PageRank compared when you decide not to link out. However, if you choose to link out as part of your link building campaign, experts advise to choose pages that has both a low PR and a lot of links to your site.
3. The internal quality of your site. Your site’s navigational components and linkages must be able to distribute PageRank within the whole site. To accomplish this, Google’s algorithms must consider as much content in your site as worthy of being indexed. Developing quality content creates more PageRank and boosts link popularity.

While PageRank is a valuable tool, achieving link popularity through PR optimization must be combined with quality visitor experience. Gaining higher PageRank will not amount to any significance if users could not find content to enhance their experience when navigating your site.