Tag Archives ⇒ nofollow

Google PageRank 101

· Brandon Hann

This is an introduction to PageRank–a ranking system used on Google and starting to be implemented on other major search engines.

To understand PageRank, you have to understand complex algorithms and the relationship from one website to the next. In my previous post, we discussed a meta tag called rel=nofollow which is used to control and shape PageRank “flow” from one site to another. Now, we’ll go over what PageRank is and why it’s important to make your website stand out above the rest.

PageRank was created by Google co-founder Larry Page and although the name is perfect for what it does, it was actually named after Larry and not a web page. It’s a patented system of assigning weighted values (PR0 through PR10) to a set of hyperlinked documents, or in other words, a website. It’s used to distinguish important websites from less important websites and as you would imagine, the higher your PageRank, the more valuable your site is.

Back in the old days, the success of a search engine was based solely on how many webpages it had in its index. The more sites you can list, the better your results. Today, however, there are just too many sites to manage and it seems that there are at least 100,000 websites for every topic you can imagine. On top of that, the majority of these sites all contain the exact same content. This is because everyone wants a piece of the pie when it comes to making money online, but nobody wants to work for it. Sounds like the real world!

So, Larry Page decided that a search engine shouldn’t be focused on how many sites they can list, but what kind of quality these sites have. Of course, just asking people would be foolish because everyone has a quality site, right? The PageRank feature is such a powerful scoring system and in my opinion it almost encourages development. As an example, my site is a PageRank 2 site and I’m striving to climb up that ranks by providing a 100% original content site and to get backlinks from higher PR sites.

Backlinks

A major part of the PR system is backlinking. This is simply when a website links to your site. The following diagram shows a series of websites. The smaller the circle, the lower the PR score. When a lot of sites link to one site, the circle becomes larger, thus a higher PR score. In the example, Site B has a high PR because a lot of other sites like its content and have linked to it. We’ll discuss Site C in just a bit.

Getting backlinks is not always as easy as it sounds. I can write a whole post on this alone-I just might! Mostly, backlinks come from visitors who view your site, like something on it and link to it from their own site. Alternatively, a lot of webmasters will scour the Internet asking other site owners to trade links with them. One thing to remember is 100 links from 100 PR0 sites is worth far less than 1 link from 1 PR6 site.

PageRank Value

Looking back at the diagram above, you’ll notice that Site C only has one backlink to it, but it’s bigger than Site E which has more incoming links. This is because the one link that Site C has is coming from a high ranking site (Site B). What has happened is because Site B “likes” Site C, it has allowed its own PageRank score to flow into Site C. Of course, Site B doesn’t actually give it’s points away, but it has just told Google that Site C is worth looking at. At first, it seems like this system can be a little unfair, but if you think about it, it really helps to keep quality sites at your fingertips.

When you search for something, you want it fast and you want it right, so how else would we determine which sites get placed at number 1?

There are many resources out there to explain PageRank in much more detail, but I wanted to get you some basic information to help you understand just how important it can be for your site. I will be creating guides on how to get backlinks and to increase your PR score in the near future.

What is the "rel=nofollow tag"?

· Brandon Hann

When it was introduced by Google, a lot of people were skeptical of it’s purpose. It is generally believed to have been created for the sole purpose of controlling how a website’s PageRank is shared among external links. As an example, if your website has a PageRank of 6, every external link you have on your site will get a piece of your high score, which means one link from you might be worth 10 times that of a single link from a PageRank 1 site.

Now, I don’t have all the numbers and nobody really knows for sure what the exact formula is, but that’s the general idea. Higher PageRank sites are considered “authorities” on their subject matter and are therefore granted with the ability to make other sites more important in terms of search rankings. The thought process behind this is that the high PageRank site is a legitimate site with actual, helpful information and in turn, they are rewarded for their quality contributions to the Internet. Google then realizes that if these site’s are going to link to someone else, they must be serious about it, so they allow the PageRank to “flow” to the next location.

What exactly is it?

The tag is used in a link such as this:

a href="https://www.ledfrog.com/links/" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Click here.

It tells Google that this link can be followed (meaning the GoogleBot will go to that page and crawl everything there), but it does not have to take into account the PageRank score of the referring site. Other search engines take the meaning literally and do not even go to the site. I believe Ask.com is the only site that simply ignores the tag completely.

So, where does the rel=nofollow tag fit in? The first automated occurrence of this tag can be noticed on most blogs out there–more specifically, the comments section. It’s true, if you thought that by running around the Internet, posting comments on other blogs in hopes that all those website links were creating backlinks to your site, you were wrong (most of the time)!

There actually are two valid reasons for doing this to blog comments. The first one is obviously spam. I can’t even begin to tell you how much spam comments I get on my site each day and my site isn’t a high traffic site so far. Spammers in this sense will generate some very generic comments for a random posting on your blog and somewhere within the comment or attached to their name will be one or more external links. The second reason for doing this is that you might not want to be passing on your PageRank to sites that are completely unrelated to your site as this, in time, may actually cause your own score to go down.

My view on this is I don’t use the rel=nofollow tag on my post comments for two reasons. One, spammers don’t get through on my site. I use the Akismet plugin and it stops almost everything! When it doesn’t, the comment sits in queue and waits for my approval anyway, so what do I care? The second reason is that I feel when someone makes a comment on my site, they are taking the time to contribute an opinion of some sort and the sheer fact that they were even on my site usually means they run a blog that’s similar in content, so I give them some credit.

The rel=nofollow tag that was supposed to help with spam and the degradation of PageRank has now become a useful tool in the art of PageRank Sculpting. In the coming days, I’ll be going over more about PageRank and SEO tips to maintain control of your external links.

I recently found a blog post that discussed this topic more in depth, including a blurb about the opposite for no-follow called do-follow. If you want to read more about these tags, check out Jack Nguyen’s blog post.

How do you get links?

Getting those links that will pay out the oh-so-important “link juice” can be a difficult task. I wrote an article describing 10 ways to increase traffic to your blog and while these tips will most certainly pony up the links, one thing to remember is link building takes time. The normal way of doing this is a perfect balance of creating great content that other sites will link to automatically and getting out there and literally trading links.

However, there are services out there that can help you build your links. Professional link building services can save you the time and frustration of having to go out all over the Internet and round up links by yourself. They can also tailor linking campaigns specifically for your website–something that you may not have the time to do. This way you can guarantee that the links you’re getting aren’t simply random, unrelated websites.

Ultimately, as enough time passes by, the amount of links that your website obtains will grow. As long as you keep creating great content and providing services and information that people want, your site will grow as well.