Increase Google Pagerank and Get a Higher Search Engine Ranking

Learning how to increase the pagerank of your site is absolutely critical if you write articles, create content or sell anything online. What you don't know can keep you from getting a higher website pagerank and better search engine ranking. Actually, you can even get your site blacklisted by Google if you keep doing search engine optimization strategies that used to work, but no longer follow changes in the guidelines.

If you can improve the pagerank of your site, you can improve your organic search engine traffic and income online. One of the most effective ways to increase page rank is by getting more backlinks and building link popularity. With implementation of nofollow tagging by many high authority blogs and websites, pagerank has evaporated for many sites. What used to be easy strategies for building link popularity and getting backlinks have disappeared.

The good news is that you can still get more backlinks with article submission to directories. Article directories usually have high pagerank — and they do not use nofollow tagging! So, you can increase the pagerank of your site by building link popularity through article submissions. In turn, you can improve your site's search engine ranking by improving pagerank.

What is pagerank? Google pagerank explained

Pagerank (PR) is a numerical value which reflects the importance of a page on the web. Based on Google's algorithm, a pagerank of 0-10 is assigned to a web page. Pagerank is one of the important factors that determine the ranking of a web page on Google's search results. The higher a page is ranked on Google's PR scale, the more likely that its placement on search engine results will be higher. So, any improvement in pagerank can dramatically improve your site's traffic and income.

The pagerank is derived from a theoretical probability value on a logarithmic scale. It is a probability distribution used to represent the likelihood that a websurfer randomly clicking on links will arrive at any particular web page or web site.

Since pagerank is set on a logarithmic scale, it can be a lot harder to move up from PR3 to PR10 compared to going from PR of zero to PR1, PR2 then PR3. It's not based on a simple linear scale in which the level of difficulty going from PR of zero to PR10 is equal.

For example, a PR1 site has 10 times more authority than PR 0 (zero). However, a PR3 site has 1000 times more authority than PR 0 (zero). A PR4 site has 10,000 times more authority than PR 0 (zero). A PR5 site has 100,000 times more authority than PR 0 (zero).

Note: A web site or a web page can be assigned a pagerank and a search engine ranking. We will refer to your web page or web site as "your site". Pagerank will also be called PR or page rank.

How do you improve pagerank?

The preferred way for Google is for web publishers not to do anything to increase the pagerank of their site. If you have quality content, your site will naturally get more links as it gets older. The age of your site as well as the links pointing to it can gradually improve its pagerank. The problem is that most people do not want to wait months or years for their site to get a better pagerank.

One of the most effective ways to improve your site's pagerank is by getting more backlinks and building link popularity. The quantity and quality of backlinks pointing to your site can affect pagerank.

The more quality sites linking to your site, the more important it appears to Google. Each backlink is considered a "vote" for your website from another site. A backlink from a site with a high PR has greater weight compared to one with a low PR.

What is link popularity?

Link popularity is a measure of the quality and quantity of backlinks to your site. It is one of the most important off-page optimization factors that can boost page rank and search engine ranking.

Google uses a top secret algorithm to rank web sites and web pages. Backlinks are considered important votes from other sites and can affect a site's credibility. Why? It's reasonable to think that sites with quality content will attract many links from other web sites. In contrast, sites with low-quality content will have difficulty getting backlinks.

In contrast to search engine optimization using keywords, meta-tags and other on-page factors, link popularity is considered less biased. So, it plays a very important role in getting a high PR and a high search engine ranking.

Table of Contents: Improve Pagerank and Get Better Search Engine Ranking: 8 Tips On How to Increase Pagerank By Building Link Po

1. Stop Looking For Get-Rich-Quick Tips and Seek Real Money-Making Education Instead
2. 8 Tips for Building Link Popularity: Dos and Don'ts of Getting Backlinks
3. Video: How Do You Improve Your Pagerank?
4. Get Free Backlinks and Improve Link Popularity By Article Submission to Directories
5. Video On How to Get Free Backlinks to Increase Pagerank and Get Better Search Engine Ranking
6. How to Increase Your Site's Search Engine Ranking, Traffic and Income — the Easy Way
7. Creative New Ideas to Make Money — Fast
8. Web Marketing Strategies: Increase Site Traffic and Income
9. Search Engine Optimization: Increase Site Traffic and Income
10. How to Improve Pagerank and Increase Web Site Traffic
11. Useful Lenses

8 Tips for Building Link Popularity: Dos and Don'ts of Getting Backlinks

Not all backlinks are considered equal. If you're not careful, your site can be penalized by Google. This is called the "sandbox effect" or sandboxing. Instead of getting a higher PR and search engine ranking, your site can get a lower ranking when it's sandboxed or penalized by Google. Of course, the worst penalty is getting blacklisted by Google — it has happened to some sites and it can happen to your site.

This penalty is an effort to counter excessive manipulation of Google's PR and search engine ranking by marketers rapidly creating "link popularity" for poor-quality sites. If your site is sandboxed, it may have a lower PR and lower search engine ranking temporarily or permanently.

To avoid getting penalized by Google, it's important to build good quality backlinks slowly. Here are 8 tips for building link popularity and improving Google page ranking:

1. The quality of your site's backlinks can be more important than the quantity. A link to your site from a high-PR directory or high-authority site carries a lot more weight than one from an obscure personal page. A few backlinks from yahoo.com, stumbleupon.com, twitter.com, facebook.com and other social networking sites can have a greater effect than 50 backlinks from low-PR sites.

2. Relevance of keywords on your site getting backlinks can influence the pagerank. Use your keywords in your anchor text because it is given significant weight in pagerank and search engine ranking. The anchor text for the link should give the user relevant descriptive or contextual information about the destination site. It may or may not be related to the actual text of the URL of the site.

3. Getting backlinks from sites penalized by Google can get your site penalized. Sites usually are not penalized because of where their backlinks are coming from. They usually don't have any control over other sites linking to it. However, there are exceptions to this rule.

According to Google's guidelines, "Avoid links to web spammers or "bad neighborhoods" on the web, as your own ranking may be affected adversely by those links."

Getting backlinks from link farms or free for all (FFA) sites can get your site penalized. These sites usually do not offer useful content for users. Instead, they are specially set-up to attempt to manipulate Google's PR and search engine ranking algorithms. Getting backlinks from these sites is considered spamming. So, don't waste your time and money on link farms and FFA sites. Not only can they lower your site's ranking, they can even get your site blacklisted from Google.

If your previously-indexed site suddenly doesn't have any page listed on Google, it could be a sign that it may have been blacklisted.

4. Reciprocal linking can have a limited effect on your site's PR and search engine ranking. A reciprocal link is a mutual link between two sites. If the two websites have related themes, the reciprocal link can help both sites earn a relevant backlink for increasing its link popularity. However, the reciprocal link exchange may not have an equally beneficial PR-boosting effect if one of the sites has a much higher PR than the other. For example, the site with PR2 can benefit a great deal from pagerank sharing from a site with PR5. In contrast, the PR5 site will get less PR-boosting effect from a reciprocal link exchange with the PR2 site. Another scenario to consider is that a PR5 site with hundreds of outgoing links will have less PR-boosting effect than a PR2 site with only few or zero outgoing links. Why? The PR-boosting effect is shared with all the outgoing links from the site.

5. Backlinks from orphan pages will not affect your link popularity. Orphan pages do not have any incoming links from other pages on the web. Google does not index a web page if it doesn't have at least one page linking to it. So, it will not be included in the search results. If a web page is not indexed by Google, its backlink doesn't have any value for another site's link popularity. Furthermore, it can't have a PR value and it can't share its pagerank with other sites.

6. One-way links can be very effective in increasing your site's link popularity as well as PR and search engine ranking. One-way links are incoming or inbound links to one site without any reciprocal link going to another site. Unlike reciprocal linking, the PR value of the site with the outgoing link is not shared. Instead, the PR-boosting effect can go one-way to the site getting the backlink. One caveat is that the value of the PR shared from one site is shared with all the outgoing links. The fewer outgoing links, the higher the PR-boosting effect from the site giving the link.

7. Sites listed in Yahoo and dmoz.org [Open Directory Project (ODP)] may get a special pagerank boost from Google. Both directories have very high page rank; so, they're good backlinks to have. However, it's unclear if Yahoo has the same PR-boosting effect it used to have many years ago. A DMOZ listing, on the other hand, can have a huge impact on your pagerank and search engine ranking.

Although people don't use DMOZ for searches the way they use Yahoo, there are many advantages of getting listed in the directory. DMOZ data can be freely downloaded and used by any website. DMOZ data power some the most popular portals and search engines on the Web, including Google, AOL Search, Netscape Search, Lycos, HotBot and hundreds of others.

Google's directory is the downloaded DMOZ directory. So, a listing in DMOZ also gives your site a listing in the Google directory. In addition to the great backlinks from these very high-PR sites, your site will also get backlinks from thousands of other sites that use the DMOZ data they have downloaded. Due to this cascade of effects, a DMOZ listing can take your site from a PR value of 3 to 4 or even 5.

It's free to get listed in DMOZ. The downside is that the sites are reviewed by volunteer editors. The DMOZ site mentions that there are 84,778 editors. In reality, the number of *active* volunteers who review and add websites to the directory is much smaller. Since the number of sites trying to get listed is growing exponentially, it can take a very long time to get listed. After submission, you're informed that it can take 2 weeks up to several months to get a directory listing — if your site gets accepted! At this time, there is no way to find out if your site has been reviewed, rejected or is still waiting for a review.

8. Backlinks from nofollow sites will not boost your site's pagerank. What does this mean? Nofollow is an html attribute that tells Google bot and other search engine spiders that a hyperlink should not be scored or used for ranking. The nofollow attribute is intended to decrease spamming of search engines; it is intended to increase the quality of search engine results.

The rel="nofollow" attribute added to the anchor tag tells Google bot that the hyperlink should not share the reputation of the referring site to any page linked to; so, it will not influence your site's ranking, but the Google bot will still follow the link.

After Google started using the nofollow attribute, other websites started using it, too. To decrease spamming, the rel="nofollow" tag is used for outgoing links from wikipedia.org, digg.com and other social bookmarking and networking sites. Twitter.com uses nofollow on some links. YouTube.com uses nofollow on a number of "share" links.

To decrease spamming, nofollow tags are usually used on user-submitted blog comments, links, user profile pages as well as forum signatures and posts.

WordPress versions 1.5 and above, automatically enables the nofollow attribute on all user-submitted comments and links. However, there are free plugins available that can automatically remove the nofollow attribute from this popular blogging platform.