Ways To Achieve A Good Google PR
by Jorjeo Iveniscovich
It is becoming increasingly common knowledge that what you need to get your site high in the rankings of search engines is lots of links pointing at your site. Links have different values however, some are worth more than others. You could rank higher than a site with 20,000 links pointing at it with just 3000 links pointing at your site if all your links were of a better quality.
There are many things that affect how much a given link is worth but the main one that holds the most weight is the Page Rank or PR that Google has assigned the page you’re receiving the link from.
Google basically gives every page it finds a rank from 0 to 10. This wont happen straight away because Google only reviews Page Rank (PR) every six months or so. The highest rank is of course, 10 and lowest is 0 however there are some pages that simply have no PR (the PR just reads as n/a) and these will probably be new sites that Google hasn’t found yet, or a fairly insignificant page deep in the site, or in the worst case scenario it could mean that Google has blacklisted that site. PR 10 sites are very rarely seen (except google.com) as there are only around 9 in existence.
So what is there to gain from a good PR? Well, if your site receives a link from a high PR site like a PR 7 or 8, then it will massively more beneficial than a link from a PR 1 or 2 site. In essence, what PR is, is how valuable and genuine Google considers the content of your page to be on a scale of 0-10. Each link counts as a vote for the integrity of the page it is linking to, and so if a PR 8 page votes for you then Google concludes that your page must be of high value, because a high value site says it is, and it will therefore push you further up the results rankings.
Having a high PR page does not directly benefit you, but it does mean that you will be in a position to offer better quality links out to other sites, and so you can then request high quality links back. So the higher your PR, the better chance you’ve got of being ranked highly, but only if you do the work to get the links, it wont do anything on its own.
There is almost a catch 22 situation when you first start trying to get your site some PR in that the main thing you need in order to acquire a good PR is quality links. The problem with this is that before you have any PR, people are going to be unwilling to give you a quality link because you wont be able to offer them one back. There is a way around this, but it takes time.
A good method to start off with is to find some sites that are in the same position as yourself (with related themes to yours if possible, but I wouldn’t worry too much about that) i.e. they are looking to build some PR by getting lots of links, and exchange links with these sites. Then (provided these sites have kept their efforts up) in 6 months to a years time, these sites will have some PR, and will still be linking to you, therefore you will have some PR by then, making these initial link exchanges mutually beneficial.
Links are not the only thing that count when building PR, something else that we know counts towards it is how often the content is updated. Content that is updated on a regular basis hold far more weight with Google than content that is left the same.
This is because the content will appear to have gone stale after a while; after all, news wouldn’t be news if it was old! Google likes to be able to give its searchers the most up to date and relevant information it can, and so sites that are regularly updated will be given preference.
