I have few medium traffic traffic sites which i have been running for about a year. I did lots of link building work by submitting to directories which are free of charge.

I did a check with future prediction of pagerank and tools like iwebtool shows i will be getting PR5 in the future. No matter how hard i try, the maximum attainable page rank seems to be PR5. My question is what exactly need to be done to push that page rank to PR6 or more...

Has any one done that before...

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My question is what exactly need to be done to push that page rank to PR6 or more...

Some factors affecting PageRank are:
-Anchor Text of a link
-Prominence of a link within a document
-Relevance between web pages
-Importance of the linking pages
-Age of linking pages
-Age of your domain

For example, you have no control over the age of your domain, or the what the other sites do to their webpages.

So, bottomline, the best the PageRank prediction software gets you, is at a PR6. That's not too shabby.

Hope this helps:-)

commented: yup he is right :) +0

My thoughts on Pagerank as of SES-NYC 2006.
1. the general public does not know the current pagerank formula.
2. the general public does not know if pagerank is still used - many SEO experts say NO.
3. the green bar on your toolbar is not a metric of pagerank. it is a rough measure of how your page was perceived by G at some unknown point in time within roughly the last 90-100 days.
4. has little to do with where your site will appear on the SERPs
5. most likely reflects how often and how deep gbot will index, if there is currently such a thing as PR.
6. Mike Grehan, international link building expert repeatedly calls PR fairy dust, and repeatedly preaches to uninstall the toolbar.

Great reply Promediacorp!

I can confirm that PageRank is not an indication of ranking in the SERP's. I have optimized a few brand new websites that were immediately in the top 3 rankings....above the PR6 competitive sites.

Although, like you said,

it is a rough measure of how your page was perceived by G at some unknown point in time within roughly the last 90-100 days.

.
That is enough for many SEO's to still consider PageRank when optimizing.

PageRank is a direct measure of the power that external backlinks brought the given page at some point in the past. We know that the power of your backlinks influences how frequently and how deeply googlebot crawls your site. Therefore, the Google PR toolbar is a direct measure of how deeply googlebot was likely to crawl your site in the past and therefore how well indexed you most likely are right now. It has NOTHING - I repeat *nothing* - to do with ranking.

Hi cscgal,

You are correct.
But, not all webmasters adhere to these factors affecting PageRank. If they did adhere to SEO best practices of linking strategy, then they most likely will attain a higher pagerank, get their site crawled more frequently by Googlebot, and by default they will probably attain a higher position in the SERP's.

Although, PageRank by itself is not an indication of SE ranking.

Do we really know for certain if the green bar on the toolbar correlates with anything NOWADAYS, even how deep Gbot will spider?

Let me try to reexplain my thinking:

This is what we know: (1) That the little green bar corresponds to how deeply google spiders our site. (2) That the little green bar we see is old data, and hence, tells us what happened in the past. (3) That the depth google spiders our site correlates to how many pages we get in their index.

Therefore, if we see a high green bar TODAY, that means that at some point in the past we had lots of backlinks, hence got spidered deeply, hence TODAY have lots of pages indexed.

If we have lots of backlinks TODAY, we will get lots of pages indexed TOMORROW, and TODAY's PR will be reflected in the green toolbar TOMORROW.

Therefore, if we see a high green toolbar TODAY, that means we got spidered a lot YESTERDAY and have lots of pages indexed TODAY.

Whew!! :)

Some factors affecting PageRank are:
-Anchor Text of a link
-Prominence of a link within a document
-Relevance between web pages
-Importance of the linking pages
-Age of linking pages
-Age of your domain

So, bottomline, the best the PageRank prediction software gets you, is at a PR6. That's not too shabby.

Thanks shimon for making some excellent points on this. so are you saying that i should allow plenty of time to cross PR5 barrier?

I absolutely had no problem with google indexing my site's deep level pages. It crawled and indexed almost 35'000 pages within a month, which i believe a strong indication of good ranking with google. Normally for any ordinary sites, it takes about 3-4 months to index this much amount of pages. So my guess is i do believe these page rank prediction tools, are not bad at all.

Some factors affecting PageRank are:
-Anchor Text of a link
-Prominence of a link within a document
-Relevance between web pages
-Importance of the linking pages
-Age of linking pages
-Age of your domain

So, bottomline, the best the PageRank prediction software gets you, is at a PR6. That's not too shabby.

Thanks shimon for making some excellent points on this. I think my pages are well linked and can easily meet 1-4 points by you, except last two. so are you saying that i should allow plenty of time to cross PR5 barrier?

I absolutely had no problem with google indexing my site's deep level pages. It crawled and indexed almost 35'000 pages within a month, which i believe a strong indication of good ranking with google. Normally for any ordinary sites, it takes about 3-4 months to index this much amount of pages. So my guess is i do believe these page rank prediction tools, are not bad at all.

Thanks shimon for making some excellent points on this. I think my pages are well linked and can easily meet 1-4 points by you, except last two. so are you saying that i should allow plenty of time to cross PR5 barrier?

Exactly. Just keep doing everything you're doing (I'm assuming your following SEO Best Practices), and you'll be in great shape.

I'm glad I could help:-)

Patience is a virtue. Unfortunately, I don't have any patience. I could never survive in the SEO industry :)

Pagerank is not a replacement for ranking. I have rec'd calls that said I want to be PR=6 or 7 and I ask why and they say because i will then rank high. Not true.

We - who do SEO - should propogate the notion that for your keyword(s) your are on page one above the fold. That delivers brand awareness and traffic... not a PR=6.

Yes? No? Maybe?

Hear, hear! No, seriously, toolbar pagerank is just a measure of the power of your backlinks from sometime in the past.

My recommendation is content, content, content and then couple it with periodic press releases. This worked with some sites i had, getting one up to a PR 7 but it took a year. But if you update content, focus on link value, and then issue press releases and other immediate link building tactics, you sholud be ok.

Lots of content is an amazing thing, but it has nothing at all to do with pagerank. Well, kinda. The more pages you have, the more pagerank you can "create" to distribute to other pages of your site. But pagerank is a measure of backlinks ... both internal and external.

per Learn2Earn, you get something a whole lot better than page-rank... you get traffic!!

CSC ... pagerank is a measure of Relevance. Relevance is content first - and "quality" back-links second. Without good content, a million links will give you a low page rank. However, with great content and no links - a PR=5 is easily achievable.. maybe '6'.

sph, where did you hear that? PageRank has NOTHING to do with link relevancy. That's simply just, well, not true :-/

To be successful in your site, you need three criterias

Content is king - provides unique, interesting contents on your site.

Links - The more links other sites link to you the better it is.

Success won't happen overnight - Be patient and do what gots to do to improve your page rank and don't give up...

I'm quite new in SEO but I have some basics, so my opinion:

Content is indeed important, make sure you don't copy paste texts from other sites and refresh or add extra content. But I don't believe that having a "good/interesting/..." content will help you directly. Remember that the googlebot is still a program. It can only compare with other sites not add an opinion "good/bad".

A question still not clear, what is the best:

Have 20 high quality sites linking to your website

OR

Have those same 20 high quality links + 180 junk

?

Kind regards!

sph, where did you hear that? PageRank has NOTHING to do with link relevancy. That's simply just, well, not true :-/

CSC - think of it this way. If you are a site that is about Plasma TV's and all the folks that link to you are personal bloggers or sites about automobiles --- how relevant are these links?

If on the other hand, the links are from other sites that have solid page ranks and and are about consumer electronics, televisions and similar - this is more value.

Google wants all of it's ranked sites to be relevant for the user. Therefore if all your links are "junk" - google says this is not very relevant. If all your links are related - and relevant, your site is rewarded.

It all goes back to relevance -- which is why spam links are worthless and harmful.

Another factor - the sites that link to you should have page ranks that are similar to your site or better...

--- Lastly 20 great links and 180 poor ones. that is - IMHO - slightly better than just 20 great links. BUT slightly. and if a majority of those 180 poor ones are from know spam sites --- then this could be harmful to your site.

Best advice - go for the good related links. Make sure the link tag is written in a relevant way "learn more about Plasma Televisions" is far suppior to "click here"

;)

... It has NOTHING - I repeat *nothing* - to do with ranking.

"It" refering to PageRank?

If so, then a more correct statement would be : Ranking in the SERPs has something to do with PageRank.

... Google uses PageRank™ to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important. It then conducts hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted. By combining overall importance ( PageRank ) and query-specific relevance, Google is able to put the most relevant and reliable results first.

Can't say it better than Google... can we :)

Very good thread :)

I read here that SEO experts say that pagerank is not used by Google anymore.

If that's true then why they keep wasting their multimillion dollar resources to keep it alive?

That does not sounds good to me.

Google still has, and uses, its own internal PageRank algorithm. It's just that the PR value that you see on the Google toolbar is becoming more and more unreliable as far as figuring out the internal PR value Google has assigned to a page ... and G wants to keep it this way to throw SEOs off track.

"toolbar pagerank is just a measure of the power of your backlinks from sometime in the past. "
How this blog http://webhostingstart.blogspot.com/ get a PR2?
Msn 3 links and yahoo 3 links...........

PageRank is a direct measure of the power that external backlinks brought the given page at some point in the past. We know that the power of your backlinks influences how frequently and how deeply googlebot crawls your site. Therefore, the Google PR toolbar is a direct measure of how deeply googlebot was likely to crawl your site in the past and therefore how well indexed you most likely are right now. It has NOTHING - I repeat *nothing* - to do with ranking.

Well, then how do you explain the effects of "Google Bombing". It's just a links campaign using a specific keyword that links to a website. Do you think the website with the Biography of Bush is optimized for the keyword "failure"? Not at all, but there are hundreds of thousands of links pointing to that site and using that particular keyword. Run a search for the keyword in Google and you'll see it in #1. So Page Rank IS important for ranking.

And... my website needs some ;-)

Thanks,

ES

It's funny to read all this, because in the browser beneath this one I have iwebtool's rank checker handy.

I've become obsessed with it over the last 30 to 60 days, desperately trying to get my site a PR ranking of 5 or better.

I've got a boat load of content, old content, fresh content, content content content!

Yet I have PR4 and an Alexa ranking of around 260,000

I'm obsessing over nothing, right???

I'll try to keep the iwebtool checking to a minimum this week. :)

Content has nothing to do directly with the Gogle PR. It's the amount of incoming links. Yes, theoretically, if you have good content, people will link to your site. The higher the PR you have achieved, the harder it is to jump to the next level. If you are obsessed with the Google PR, you should read the basics of the Google algorithm
http://www.iprcom.com/papers/pagerank/

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