What does Google PageRank Mean?

Interesting PageRank Changes

Google PageRank Summary

There are two primary uses for knowing this value.  The first, and most important is that it gives you a reasonable idea of how your site promotion is going.  As you work on your SEO and link building, you want to see that it’s doing something.  The primary way is to check your rankings in Google for important keyword searches.  However, the PageRank number is a nice summary so you can get a rough idea of how you’re doing in a  single number.

The second use for this number is if you do any sort of marketing yourself.  When you post links for other websites, they will have more value if you have a higher PageRank.  Therefor, if you are selling links, or article writing, or something similar, they will be more valuable on a website with a higher PageRank.  This is only important if you are actually charging clients to write blog articles or something similar, so it doesn’t matter otherwise.  Because most of us aren’t writing pay-per-link articles, this particular use usually gets more attention than it’s worth.  Keep that in mind when you’re looking at your PageRank.

So, check out some of the other articles we have on Google PageRank (when it was last updated in June) and get a better handle on your website’s SEO.  Subscribe to our RSS feed, so you’ll always know when the Google PageRank update is released!

Squeezing Twitter

One-hundred forty characters.  That’s all you get, 140.  Well, maybe that’s all Twitter will give you, but we can definitely fit more than 140 in there.  The main trick is to use URL shortening services, but that’s rookie stuff.  There are ways to get a lot more into your Twitter posts than just shortening a URL.  Let’s discuss at least two other ways you can use to get more into your Twitter posts… but first, let’s cover the rookie stuff.

Before you can really get the most out of your SEO on Twitter, you have to at least understand URL shorteners.  These are friendly little web applications that allow you to take a really long URL and turn it into a very short one.  For example, I recently used a service called bit.ly to turn this “http://www.christianfinancialblog.com/2009/06/the-value-of-money/” into this “http://bit.ly/3t3qjB“.  Much shorter, right?  This allows you to fit very long URLs into your 140 characters of Twitter.  We’ll write an article on this soon, but for now you can check out a service like bit.ly and see how it works.

Now for the more interesting secrets.

The first involves making shortened URLs even shorter.  Twitter recognizes the “http://” and turns the following text into a link.  However, we’re loosing 7 characters to do that!  That’s 5% of my total real estate!  Instead, we’re just going to put “www.” in front of any URL we shorten.  Twitter doesn’t care that it doesn’t end in .com, so you can just use www.bit.ly and twitter will turn that into a link.  Bam!  Even Shorter URLs!

Next is another way to shorten URLs and I’ll only mention this one briefly.  If you have a URL that you expect to update all the time, think about registering your own domain name for it.  For example, I frequently advertise my DVD Catalog website, DVDCorral.com.  To compromise between URLs that don’t convey information (bit.ly/#$@!^) and long URLs (www.DVDCorral.com), I bought an extra domain name.  I can now make posts with www.dvdc.at.  It’s short and to the point and still gives folks an idea of where they are going.  This cost me $15 / year and seemed worth it.  For odd domain extensions you may need to find a unique domain provider who sells domains from that country.

Finally, use special characters where appropriate.  For example, I often use ellipsis (…) as I did in the beginning of this article.  They represent 3 periods and a space usually.  On Twitter that means you’ve given up 4 characters to convey some amount of emotion or suspense.  Well, it turns out there is a character just for the ellipsis.  Just copy and paste that character into your Twitter message and you have turned 4 characters into one!  The extra space is actually included in the ellipsis special-character.

For your reference, here are some of the characters you can use on Twitter.  Use the “Share” button below to bookmark this page (with Digg, Flurl, StumbleUpon, etc.) so you can find it again later when you want to copy and paste these characters into your Twitter messages.

It wasn’t all good, however. I took a search of 5 blogs that I know participate in paid posting and 3 of them had their PageRank drop. One of them actually dropped from PR5 to PR2 — quite a drop for < 30 days! The others only dropped 1 point to PR4. Those were the only sites I found that dropped from the recent update, so it could be possible that Google changed their algorithms to target pay per post blogs.

What surprised me most about the jump of DVDCorral.com is that the PageRank scale is non-linear. That means going from 1 to 2 is much harder than going from 0 to 1. For example, the Richter scale is a logarithmic scale which measures earth quakes. There are about 120 level 6 earth quakes per year, but only 18 level 7. Go all the way to level 8 and there's only 1 per year. What does this mean for SEO? It means that whatever work you do to get from PR2 to PR3, you'll have to do much more to get from PR3 up to PR4. How much more? No one is really sure. I have heard estimates that one level to the next is about 4 or 5 times as many links (assuming equal quality links).

I also noticed my mother's Prayer Music Website went up from a PR0 to a PR1. Her site is fairly new, so Google has only found links from Twitter.com so far. Twitter, however, is now a PageRank 9. One has to wonder if the increase in links to Twitter (and Google’s corresponding PR increase) has made it a more valuable place for online advertising.

This may be bad news for blogs that are selling paid advertisements as posts, but it looks like good news for those of us who love Twitter. Catch me @bgeisel1.

Does PageRankSubmit Measure Up?

There are so many sites out there advertising how they will provide you with great SEO, it’s hard to wade through the muck.  Every site has big promises, and more often than not they end up disappointing on those promises.  For better or for worse, I’ll do my best to keep you updated on my experiences so you can avoid the disasters and flock to the successes.  It’s nice to sit in my blogging lair today and bang out an article on the latter, a website that successfully delivered on (at least some of) the hype.

You probably found this site in a search for a review of PageRankReview.com, so I’ll do my best to cut to the chase.  If my reviews are honest and thorough, you’ll hopefully come back to check out my other reviews.  I was happy with PageRankReview and I’m in the process of using them for all of the sites I manage (see the Blogroll on right).  In my opinion I got $100 to $200 of SEO for $29.  It didn’t save the world, but it did get my site to show up in the first few pages of Google.

The claim from PageRankSubmit.com is that they will submit you to 100 Internet directory sites for $29 (price as of this post).  They say the sites all have a PageRank of PR4 or higher.  When you are finished, they will send you an Excel spreadsheet containing a list of the sites to which you were submitted and their PageRank.  All entries are manually submitted by their team, so you don’t have to worry about CAPTCHA issues blocking non-human entries.

In reality, I found they were pretty close to their promise.  They actually submitted my site to 101 directory sites.  I did a PageRank lookup and not all of the sites were still at their advertised PageRank, but remarkably most of them were.  My biggest concern was that some of the directories would be in Google so-called “bad neighborhoods” and that I would be penalized for it.  As far as I can tell, none of the directories had bad reputations with Google.

PageRankSubmit.com doesn’t guarantee that you will actually get listed in the directories, however, I again found that most of the sites did add me to their listings.  There are a few that didn’t, or that say they’re entirely too busy to get around to your post for the next ump-teen months.  Whatever.  There are always a few bad apples, but I prefer not to throw the baby out with the bath water.

A note to those who still have nascent SEO skills: be sure to pick a good title.  For example, Internet Starting would work, but it wouldn’t get me the Google exposure I’m looking for.  Find your top keywords (preferably from your Google Analytics account) and try to work them into your title.  For example, I used InternetStarting – Internet Business Starting.  Because PageRankSubmit is actually handled by real people, they tend to adjust the title according to the directories rules.  If this were run by a bot (an automated submission robot), for example, they might try to submit anchor text that was too long and got my submission disqualified.  Another example is for DVDCorral.com, I used DVDCorral – Personal DVD Library.  After submitting this, Google started to show DVDCorral in search results for “Personal DVD Library” — In fact, after just checking I found DVDCorral ranked #2 in Google for “Personal DVD Library”.  Looks like it worked very well!  Be sure to create a title that includes a few good keywords for your own site as well as the actual name of your site.

What happens next?  Well, prepare to get about 100 e-mails from these directory sites confirming your submissions.  I find that it usually takes 15 minutes in 3 or 4 different increments to finalize all of the submissions.  Usually it’s just clicking a link to complete the process.  A word to the wise, setup an e-mail account specifically for this submission if at all possible.  For example, I typically use first.last@mywebsite.com whenever I do a new submission.  That way if any of the sites decides to sell your e-mail you don’t have to get it in your general mailbox.  Setting up a similar account should be pretty simple to do with your web provider.

For the first couple of weeks you’ll see confirmations continue to roll in.  Google, Yahoo, Bing and the other search engines will continue to find these sites over time and adjust your rank accordingly.  It will take about a month for everything to eventually settle out.  In fact, I just received a notification recently for a site I submitted a few months ago.  That’s just a little more link love Google will be sending my way.

In all, I felt PageRankSubmit offers a pretty good service for a very fair price.  In fact, I felt it was good enough to go join their affiliate program.  Disclaimer: While I do participate in their affiliate program, that is because I feel they have a good product at a good price.  I have had other affiliate sites that I gave a negative review to and those sites won’t appear under our “Recommended Sponsors” section.  This is my honest review and if you liked it, hopefully you’ll follow this link and:

Boost Your Page Rank!

For those not familiar with Google PageRank, it is a metric Google uses to determine how “interesting” a site is. It was invented by Larry Page and hence the “PageRank”. The odd thing about PageRank is that it doesn’t directly influence search engine listings, but its indirect effects are important.

PageRank is similar to the way we determine who we trust. For example, my best friends are all essentially PageRank 10 (Google’s highest PageRank). If one of them says that Joe is a cool guy, then I trust Joe with a PageRank of about 7. Even though I don’t know Joe personally, someone I trust said he was trustworthy, so I’ll give him some amount of my own trust. If one of my PR (PageRank) 10 friends says that Joe is a good plumber, and I know someone looking for a plumber, I may recommend Joe.

Google does the same thing with webpages. When another site links to you, the “Google love” you will receive is based partly on the PageRank of that other site. Now you can see why getting a PR8 site to link to your site is a very good thing when it comes to SEO. Obviously it’s just part of the picture, but it’s important to understand how PageRank works.

Here are a few other things to remember when it comes to Google PageRank:

• The PageRank scale is logrithmic, meaning PR4 is not just “one better” than PR3.
• Google doesn’t use integer PageRank.  That means a PageRank of 1.3 will only show up as PR1 so sites of equal reported PageRank are not necessarily equivalent to Google.
• Reported PageRank is delayed.  It’s hard to know by how much, but suffice it to say that it’s not real-time.

In any case, if you’ve been wondering what your PageRank is, time to go check it.  As of May 2009 the PageRank data is fresh!  We’ll try to keep you posted in the future when we hear of additional updates (Google doesn’t announce them).

Increase Traffic with SEO

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) and Search Engine Marketing (SEM) are important to your website, so you should take some time to learn how to do it effectively.  You may have heard the axiom “Location! Location! Location!”.  Well, it’s just true on the Internet as it is for a physical location.  On the Internet, your “Location!” is determined by where you appear in search engines.  When you’re right up front in searches — that’s the equivalent of establishing your business on a main highway next to Walmart.  Sometimes it seems like black magic, but hopefully this article will shed some light on how you can more effectively market your website.

While it is possible to hire your SEO out, you can also do it yourself.  For anyone considering hiring an SEO professional, make sure they can show google searches which show their clients very high.  For everyone else, I’m going to assume you’re going to do at least some of your own SEO.  Let’s look at some of the ways you can increase your PageRank.

Google PageRank is a representation of how important Google thinks your website is.  It should not be considered the “end all, be all” of SEO, but it is one of the factors you should consider.  Without focusing on it too much, PageRank is basically increased by other websites that link to your website.  When a site like Yahoo links to your website, that’s obviously worth more than a site that gets very little traffic.

Getting links then is one of the most important ways of getting your website.  If you have a blog or another website, be sure to give yourself a link that way.  You can also write articles, or get others to write articles.  Generally, you’re going to want several hundred links (or several thousand depending on your market).  Many of those can be created yourself, but at some point you may want some help.

There are a lot of online directories that will list your site for free.  Unfortunately, it takes a lot of time to go through and submit your site to each of these directories.  Recently I decided to try a service that will submit these links for you.  I was impressed to see that they actually submitted my website to 100 directories and sent an Excel spreadsheet listing all of the sites they submitted my links to.  Total Cost: < $30!  I decided to become an affiliate so I could tell you about the service.  You can follow this link to check it out for yourself.

One last word about external links to your site: keywords.  Be sure to find out from analytics what your major keywords are.  That is, what words are sending the most / best visitors to your site.  You now want to make sure those are the words that you optimize your website for.  For example, if “Free DVD Catalog” is what you find visitors search for to find your website, then you might make your links DVDCorral – Free DVD Catalog so that Google will rank you higher for the words “DVD Catalog”.  See how I just promoted one of my other sites on a blog?

Now go and do likewise.