Simplified for Small Business, Green Enterprise, and Nonprofits
Google PageRank (PR) is a link analysis algorithm developed by Google's Larry Page and Sergey Brin in the late 1990s. Google PageRank contributes to your search engine ranking on Google search engine results pages (SERPs).
Google PageRank is one benchmark for understanding the popularity of your web site based on the number and quality of sites that link to you. A high PR page that links to your web page will confer more PageRank to your page than an inbound link from low PR page.
According to Matt Cutts, Google's spokesperson on SEO, PageRank values are published approximately once every 3 months. Therefore, Google PR is not an accurate metric for site popularity, as it is a cached value that is usually out of date.
What's my Google PageRank?
If you want to view your Google PageRank, you can download the Google Toolbar or try the nifty SearchStatus plugin for FireFox.
The Google Toolbar's PageRank feature displays as a green bar on the bottom right of your browser window. Scroll over and you will see a visited page's PageRank as a whole number between 0 and 10, with PR 10 web site being the most popular.
If you don't want to download the Google Toolbar, you can submit your site url to a number of free Google PageRank tools on the Web, such as the Google PageRank Lookup Report which will check the PR of up to 10 web sites.
PageRank Values for Popular Green & Environmental Web Sites
National Geographic - 8
An Inconvenient Truth - 7
The Discovery Channel - 7
The Nature Conservancy - 7
World Wildlife Fund - 7
TreeHugger - 6
Change.org - 5
Top PR sites include:
Google (of course) - 10
Yahoo - 10
Wikipedia - 9
MySpace - 8
How important is Google PageRank?
Don't obsess over your Google PageRank - it is just one factor in the collective algorithm that Google uses to build SERPs. While having lots of relevant, inbound high PageRank links is a good thing, high PR does not guarantee high placement in SERPs.
Bear in mind that Google calculates your PR based on the page criteria and title tag of the linking page. Google can penalize a site if it detects a large number of irrelevant links. How effective Google is at determining link relevance is a subject of debate among SEOs. However, building relevant links is a good rule of thumb in order to follow if you want to increase your site's PR.
How do I build PageRank for my site?
Andrew Gerhart's Understanding and Building Google PageRank gives a detailed overview on how PR works and what to do to improve it. Here's a summary:
In order to understand how to improve PageRank, you must understand how a site's linking structure absorbs PageRank from other sites. Suppose you are TreeHugger, with a PR of 6 for your homepage.
This means a number of web sites with PR 5 and above are linking to your homepage. Your second level pages, will then have a PR of 5, and your tertiary pages have a page rank of 3, and so forth.
How Internal Linking Affects PageRank
Your internal linking structure does not have an effect in increasing PR, but sharing PR within the overall site, with decreasing powers as you go deeper into the structure of your web site.
* Make sure that your primary page(s), the index.htm page, links to your secondary pages or secondary levels.
* Make sure that your secondary pages link to each other
* Link your secondary pages to the third level pages within their sub-directory, sub-domain, or level
* Link the third level pages within each specific sub-directory or sub-domain to each other.
* Link the third level pages back to the secondary page that it was linked from
* Make sure that the there is not heavy linking between third level pages
* Link to pages, regardless of level, that are relevant
* Link to pages, regardless of level, where the text on the page being linked from is keyword specific to the page that you are linking to
* If there are fourth level pages, follow the same linking structure that has been laid out in this checklist
* Only link pages within your site that are relevant to each other
* Use keyword specific link text when linking between pages
* Use standard HREFs in links that are easy for the search engine robots.
How External Linking Affects PageRank
External linking plays the strongest role in determining a site's PR, but it is the factor over which you have the least control. Understand that link building campaigns can be a slow, tedious process. You can request, beg, and cajole a site owner to link to you, but they may not respond in a timely way, if at all, and will likely request a reciprocal link, which confers less link juice to you than a one-way inbound link would.
It's not within the scope of this article to discuss link-building strategies, but to understand how external links pass PageRank to your site.
The exact algorithmic calculation that Google employs will likely never be divulged, but simply speaking, Google confers PR to you based on its evaluation of the linking sites PRs and their relevance to your page. Spammy, irrelevant links can negatively impact your PR.
If the sites linking to you all mention "Organic, fair-trade chocolate" and have above 6 PRs, and your page talks about "Organic, fair-trade chocolate", your PR will likely be close to 6 as well.
Don't make the mistake of randomly sending all inbound links to your homepage or the top level page of a section - the max PR you will reflect the cumulative PRs of the sites pointing to you, adjusted based on their relevance to your homepage.
Let's say you have an e-commerce site specializing in fair trade products from around the world. The theme of your homepage is "fair trade products", but one of your categories is "fair trade crafts", and your subcategories are "houseware", "jewelry", and "stationery". Identify high PR sites and pages for "fair trade products" and solicit links from them to your homepage. Then do the same for your "houseware" page, and then for each sub-category below that.
Tips on Boosting Google PageRank Through External Linking
* Understand the way PageRank trickles down through a site's internal linking structure.
* To improve the PR of your site, identify the theme and market segment of each page, find relevant web pages with higher PR and ask the site owners to link to you.
* Work on the external linking for every page from the homepage to sub-pages based on each page's topic - prioritize top level down.
Where should I seek links from to boost my Google PageRank?
Identify the keywords relevant to each page's theme, and then Google-search these terms. The sites that show up in the top positions are the sites you want to solicit links from.
Google Directory - Science > Environment > Forests and Rainforests
Another good place to begin is the Google Directory, which lists sites by category in order of PageRank. However, a site's willingness to link to you is directly proportional to the content of the page. If your content is not that exciting, you will have a harder time getting links.