An Explanation Of Google PR
It is a well known fact in the world of webmasters that you need lots of links in order to rank well in the search engine results pages. But no all links are worth the same, you can have 3000 links and rank higher than someone with 20,000 if your links are from sites of a better quality.
When calculating how much a link from a given site will be worth, there are several factors that count but you can more or less boil it down the Google Page Rank of the site/page you will be receiving the link from.
Basically, Google ranks every page it comes across (not straight away, they review it every 6 months or so) from zero to ten. Zero being the lowest, and ten of course being the highest. There are pages that Google doesnt rank that will have Page Rank (PR) n/a, this will most likely mean that Google has not found that page yet, or it is an insignificant page deep within a site, or it could mean that Google doesn’t like that site and could have blacklisted it. You will very rarely see a PR 10 site (apart from google.com) as there are only about 8 in the world.
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.
A common misconception in the SEO world is that Google PR directly helps you get higher in the results rankings. The truth is it doesn’t. It is extremely valuable however because once you start achieving good PR, people will want links from you, and because the link you will be giving them is of high quality, you can request a high quality link back.
When you first start trying to get some PR for your site, you will be faced with what is almost a catch 22 situation in that the main way in which PR is achieved, is by getting quality links. However, people will be unwilling to give you and quality links until you have some PR to give them a quality link back. So to start with, it is rather a long process.
A good way to start your campaign for high quality links is to find sites like yours, not necessarily theme related (although this does help) but sites that are relatively new and are eager to get links. These sites will be a good starting point for your linking because in six months to a years time these sites will have some PR (probably no more than 2 or 3 but that’s still well worth having) and so in the long term will be highly beneficial to your sites search engine rankings, and your PR, meaning you can start exchanging links with higher and higher PR sites.
There are other things that are taken into account when Google calculates your PR. Obviously nobody knows all of them except the people who develop the system, otherwise everyone would manipulate it to give them good PR, but what we do know is that sites that are regularly updated with fresh new content hold far more sway with Google and other search engines than sites that are left for long periods of time.
The reasoning behind this is that if a site has fresh new content every week or every fortnight or so, then the information will be the most up to date and relevant to modern times as opposed to a site that has had the same content on it for a year. Google wants to give people the best, most up to date information related to what they are looking for. If you bear this in mind when starting a PR campaign, along with the correct linking methods, you cant go far wrong.
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