What is Page Rank? Why should I care?

Those that are new to the idea of SEO may be asking the question, “What is Page Rank?”. Page Rank is a number from 0 to 10 that shows how important a website is on the internet (in the eyes of the Google search engine).

Page Rank is determined by the number and quality of links that a website receives from other websites. For instance, an SEO website’s Page Rank is raised more with links from SEO related websites than it is when it receives links from websites about irrelevant topics such as sports or food.

Another thing that may affect your Page Rank is the number of outbound links on the website that links to you. A website that has 5 or 10 outbound links will have a greater affect on your Page Rank then a website with 100 outbound links.

One thing to be careful of when you are trying to attain a good Page Rank is the sites that you link to. If you link to sites that have been penalized by Google for any reason, you may be penalized as well. A good example of a bad site to link to is a link farm. A link farm is a group of websites that link to every other website in that same group. A website will not be penalized however, if it has been linked to by a penalized site. This is a long as you have not linked back to that website.

Hopefully with this post you will understand what Page Rank is and how it is determined. If you have any questions or input, feel free to leave a comment below.

12 Things to Know About Google’s Bot

    You may notice that a lot of times during SEO, Google is a hot topic. Here I will give you 10 SEO facts about Google’s bot that can help you optimize your site to its fullest potential and enable it to be seen easily by Google Bot. If you want articles on other bots, you can check my Crawlers category, or, if I haven’t wrote an article on a bot yet, you can leave a comment here and I will research it in order to write an article about it.

1.  The easier it is to access a page, the better
2. Google will only know of a page if there is a link to it
3. Avoid cloaking! Basically, cloaking is disguising your website to seem like it is relevant to a certain topic, but it really doesn’t have anything to do with it.
4. Don’t send automated queries to Google, this violates the terms of service. I’m pretty sure you don’t want your site banned?
5. Don’t create pages with duplicate content. If you must have duplicate pages, use your robots.txt to tell web crawlers to not go to these pages.
6. Don’t use pictures to display important information such as names, or content. If you must use pictures, make sure to add the ALT attribute.
7. Don’t purchase an SEO service. Google warns that if your site is found to be affiliated with one of these services, it may be banned.
8. Natural links are better. For more information on natural links, come back tomorrow for a more in depth article on this subject.
9. Don’t fill your page with irrelevant keywords.
10. Check to see if your web server supports the If-Modified-Since HTTP Header. This allows Google to see if your site has changed since the last time it crawled it.
11. Make your site accessible by bots without things like session ids or anything else that may track a bots progress through your site.
12. If your site can’t be seen well be a text browser, chances are it can’t be seen well by Google’s bot.

Interesting Google Request…

“Dean,

Firstly, I have to admit that I was not impressed with the sarcastic nature of your reply.

Secondly, I am writing to let you know that I have contacted Google and am awaiting their reply.

I have also contacted my lawyer about this issue, so you should expect a letter in the post very soon.”

That is part of a second email that a blogger received from an angry webmaster… Interesting? Very. And also entertaining. You can check it out here.

• Google Request (Part 1)
• Google Request (Part 2)