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Ah, this old chestnut! PageRank used to be one of the sacred mantras you would hear SEOs chanting. Your PR was of huge import and anyone with a PR of 5 or above felt they had the right to look down upon you. Some people lost sleep whenever their PR dropped, or if they had tried everything and still had a PR of zero.
PageRank came into being to help Google assess pages for authority, backlinks etc. It is never quite clear if the mystery surrounding how PR was calculated was solved, but over the years, PR slid down the ranks in algorithmic importance.
Until, on Oct 14th, 2009, Google finally said very clearly and in a manner that was not up for further debate, that SEOs could all sleep soundly again and PageRank, just as they had been trying to tell anyone who would listen for quite some time, was really, really not important. In fact, it had been removed from Google webmaster tools.
So, when anyone tells you to look for sites with a high PR, or to spend time trying to increase/gain PR, you will know better!
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We all know how important it is to find sites that are willing to link back to us, but sometimes it can prove difficult to track down sites of high value with a loyal audience in our niche.
Here are 9 quick and easy ways to find sites that you can establish a link with.
Firstly, though, make your life much easier by downloading the SEO for Firefox tool. This will enable you to see at a glance how many site visitors the website you intend to link to receives, its Page Rank, the number of links to the site, its Alexa ranking, and much more.
The following are all very simple search terms that you can use to find sites to link to. Simply type your keywords or phrase and then add the term of your choice in quotation marks in the search box after your keyword.
eg internet marketing + “add URL”
1) add URL
2) add link
3) add site
4) suggest url
5) suggest link
6) suggest site
7) submit url
submit link
9) submit site
Keep a spreadsheet showing the details, such as PR, and whether you have submitted your site and when, and this will make it easy to keep an eye open for linkrot, or for sites whose PR has decreased or increased dramatically and so on.
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In a recent blog post, Matt Cutts clarifies the Page Rank debate which has raged, with particular relation to sculpting sites for PR. He recommends allowing Page rank to flow freely through your site rather than trying to sculpt pages and links to force PR to flow.
It seems that some of us SEO folk had failed to notice, or hear, what Google has been trying to intimate about use of resources and time with Page Rank. So, just to make it clear, Matt has spoken out about the issues.
Basically, content that is important should be high level not deeplinked within a site. Your site should be easily accessible to both search engine bots and human beans alike (Many people forget the human element, yet they are the ones who will buy your products!) Your site should host great content that attracts links naturally, rather than trying to force links through PR sculpting. And he is quite clear about the value of nofollow (or not) and trying to ‘hoard’ PR ie don’t.
So, we are slowly heading back to the logical, sensible path where sites respect their visitors, make navigation intuitive, and focus less on what the search engines are doing and more on what the people want to know and leading them easily and quickly to the answers.
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The value of PR has been hotly debated ever since it first appeared.There are many who believe PR is at least as important to a website and IM as air is to a human, and others who do not worry about it.
Whilst the PR can affect the position in SERPs of a specific page, it does not always, and many PR0 pages can still list in the top 3 websites for any particular search term, even above those with a higher PR, because PR is only one of the many factors affecting the Google algortithm. PR does seem to be of more benefit to older content in getting higher SERPS though.
There are other instances when PR holds a higher importance, not directly to do with the SERPs. If, for instance, you wish to sell your website or domain, then the PR will be one of the most likely factors affecting price. (Alexa and Technorati rankings may also be taken into account). For attracting links to your site or blog, a high PR will always help. If you wish to sell advertising on your site, or be paid to post on blogs, then a higher PR will help you.
However, you need a long term strategy for all of the above that is not reliant on something which is entirely outside your control – Google pagerank updates. For all of the above instances, you need to have a business model which is based not on PR, but on the value of your site, your audience, and/or your skills, and you should work with companies/advertisers/purchasers etc who understand that the price of the website/advertising/blogging is not going to fluctuate every time your PR does.
