In this issue

The pagerank concept

In a previous issue we covered the subject of keywords, and how search engines use the words on the web page to position the page in the search results.  However this is not the whole story.  Google also adds a factor which they call pagerank, which is important to understand if you want to create a flow of traffic to your website.    

Pagerank is a measure of the number and quality of the pages that have links to your page.  Each page with a link to your page casts a vote, and the total score heavily influences where you will appear in Google.  It was originally developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University who then went on to found Google.

Show me the math

I bet you are gasping to see the formula!  Well here it is anyway.

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + ... + PR(tn)/C(tn))

To state it in words, Google totals up votes cast by pages than link to your page.  The vote that is cast is made up of three things:

1. The pagerank of the page casting the vote
2. A magic number (0.85 in the original research but who knows what it is now)
3. Divided by the number of links from the page - so the more links the lower the vote.

Wasn't that interesting?

How do I find out what a site's pagerank is?

How do you find out the pagerank of a web site?  Easy - get the Google toolbar.  The Google toolbar sits as an additional toolbar on your Internet Explorer and gives you a number of services including the pagerank of any page you land on.   The pagerank is given as a score out of 10. 

So I need lots of links to my page - that should be easy to arrange.

Once the importance of pagerank became obvious,  people started to create web sites that would link to each other to generate lots of inbound links and therefore higher pagerank.  These are called 'link farms' and Google doesn't like them, in fact it may blacklist the farms and their users.  So steer clear of this sort of thing.

That is just links from other web sites isn't it?

No! Even within a web site the pages cast votes for each other.  So it's important to have lots of links inside the site to the pages you want people to find on Google.  Every page should have a link to the home page for example. 

Don't make the mistake of creating a bunch of identical pages to boost the pagerank of the home page though, Google looks for identical pages and penalises them.

Is that it?

No, that is not the whole story, Google also uses the old ranking methods by valuing keywords in different parts of the page more highly, and it has all the old antispamming rules built in. 

It also values keywords in (or near) the links from the other sites.  So for example the Toyota web site may not have the words 'sports car' particularly often, but links to the Toyota site probably will.  So the Toyota site will come up higher for our search terms than you might expect. 

So pagerank is not the whole story by any means, but it is an important part.

So what do I do to improve my client's pagerank?

The only way of improving your pagerank is to have inbound links from web sites that themselves have a high pagerank.  I can think of two right off the bat that you really must have links from.  Yahoo and The Open Directory. 

Yahoo you know about, but you may be less familiar with the Open Directory.  Both of these web sites are not search engines, but are structured directories.  Yahoo is a commercial enterprise which employs people to scan web sites and include them in the directory, it will cost you $300 per year to be included.  The Open Directory is maintained by teams of volunteers and is free.  Your client's site needs to be in both.

After that you want to solicit links from other sites that are in your area of interest.  Many sites have 'links' pages and you need to get on as many as you can.  There are probably portal sites in your client's industry you can get listed on. 

There are services that will offer to list you on thousands of search engines, but don't bother. These are mainly low quality sites which are just machines for garnering email addresses so they can spam you.  You won't be on them for long anyway and some may be listed as link farms.

Where do I get more information?

We have a white paper on search engine positioning called 'Building Site Traffic' here (you can log in with the email address this newsletter was sent to). If you want to get deeper into the subject pay to become a member of Search Engine Watch.  The geeks all assemble here.