Page Rank

Page Rank is the single most visible measure of a website's worth. Whether you are a webmaster looking for links for your website, or a professional SEO hunting links for your clients, you will invariably go for that little green bar showing in your toolbar for every website.

The danger (and this has been documented by many elite SEO experts, most notably during the recent Page Rank "fade out" of Memorial Weekend, May 2005) is that people tend to attach far too much importance to a metric that Google has progressively given less importance to.

Today Google is implementing changes to its algorithm that tend to focus a lot more on relevancy and content quality rather than static Page Rank. Add to this, Google's internal implementation of Trust Rank, and you have a situation where there is a lot of noise about nothing.

And yet, Page Rank remains an integral part of determining the value of a link. My advice is to definitely factor in the Page Rank but not to make it the end-all and be-all of your campaign. Instead, use Page Rank for the following:

• Determining if the website has earned any search engine penalty (greyed-out instead of a white or green bar)
• Establishing a ball-park estimate of how important such a link could be for your website, provided every other factor falls into place as well.

And that is the key - Page Rank really comes into play when the following criteria (content quality, relevancy and outbound links) are satisfactorily fulfilled.

Content Quality

The quality of a website's content is in turn determined by two things:

• On-site optimization - this involves maintaining keyword density, proper site maps, integral site-linking and tightly related content. (Note: you can learn more about this by clicking here )
• Off-site optimization - the popularity of a web page - its link popularity.

The quality quotient of the linking website is of great importance to search engines, especially Google.

The easy way to determine whether the website contains quality content is use the litmus test of content vs. advertising.

• If a website is obviously built for earning money - such as revenue off AdSense - then it will show through keyword stuffing and awkward reading of the site content.
• On the other hand, if the website is built to provide content - or to use content as a gateway to sell services or products - then that will be immediately visible from going through the website (usually a quick read of the main page is enough, but you might want to look at some deeper content pages).

A big problem with SEO services is that links are promised through an evaluation of Page Rank - and not by determining the quality of the linking website. If you hire an SEO service, make it clear that you want quality links, and ensure that you follow up by putting websites through this litmus test yourself.

Outbound Links per Page

The concept of monitoring the number of outbound links from a linking page is based on how Page Rank works. In
essence, a web page gets its Page Rank from the sum of the Page Ranks of the web pages linking to it. How is
that Page Rank transferred?

On any particular page, its Page Rank is equally divided between all the outbound links.
In practice, link pages tend to have a lot of outgoing links, something which can negatively impact on the outgoing
Page Rank.

Another aspect of this issue is that pages with a large amount of outbound links are invariably pages that are built
for the sole purpose of link exchange (and thus for an artificial increase in a website's rankings). While there are
no clear statements of penalty, it is an accepted SEO practice to not acquire links from web pages that have more
than a certain amount of outbound links. This figure ranges from 10 to 40, but in any case, the lesser the number
of outbound links, the better it is for you.

Links should, hypothetically, be also a source of traffic. Too many links will confuse visitors and force your link to
compete with several others.

Search Engine Penalties

The most obvious reckoning that a website has suffered a search engine penalty is to monitor the Page Rank - a penalized website will have a greyed-out bar. And yet there are other types of penalties more subtle than Page Rank.

A Sandboxed website has a soft penalty imposed on it - this will be evident if the website you see has high link popularity (large number of back links) and is a big website in terms of content, but has low search engine rankings. Such a link will still help you. On the other hand, sandboxed websites are always looking for more link exchange partners, so they will usually be more willing to exchange links.

Poor on-site and off-site optimization can drain away the website's link value. While the change may not be visible, beware of any website that has a "bad" reputation in search engines - either through spam-filled content (content for the purpose of revenue) or because banned or other "bad" websites link to it.

It is fairly hard to spot sandboxed or penalized websites immediately. This will involve a bit of digging and background research, but is ultimately more rewarding as links from websites with low or negative link value will badly damage your search engine rankings.

The only thing that needs to be spent some time on, is to determine whether the website is penalized or not. Everything else can be done in under a minute (total), so checking out a website for link compatibility should not take more than 4-5 minutes in total. If you find yourself taking much more time than that, then there is obviously something wrong with your approach.

Safe Practices

Over a period of time, as search engine algorithms have evolved and grown more refined, search engines have begun to mark out shady or "spammy" optimization techniques. In short, using these methods is likely to be hazardous for your search engine rankings. In a worst-case scenario, your website could be dropped from the search engine's index, and cleaning your website and getting it re-indexed is another hassle altogether.

Avoiding Over-Optimization

In the quest of high search engine rankings, you are quite likely to err towards making simple optimization mistakes - in fact, if you'll notice, these are lessons I've touched upon earlier in this guide as well. Listing them here should serve to reinforce their actual purpose as well as their importance.

Firstly, maintain a gradual, low-intensity, long-term approach to your link-building. There is no point in getting 3000 links in the first couple of weeks - unless your website is one of those truly spectacular websites that everyone is dying to see and use, a rapid increase in your link popularity -building puts a red flag on your website (and causes search engines to take a much closer look at the nature and quality of your back links).

Whether the process is automated or manual, it is not known, but the end result is that artificially inflating your link popularity far too FAST is a sure signal of "black-hat" SEO for search engines, and results in a penalty, either an extended stay in the Sandbox or more severe, search engine ranking penalties.

Secondly, you should allow for link text variation. This principle stems from the underlying natural link-building concept - people will "want" to link to your website - as such it is likely that not all links will have the same anchor text.

Important: When you sign up for a free LinkMetro account and add a website to your account, you will be asked to add a "website title". This is the "anchor text" for your website. It's best to change this "website title" once every few weeks. This will vary your anchor text and make your linking look more natural.

On the other hand, link building results in the website sending out just one version of link details to their link partners, and this demonstrates that the linking is in fact artificial. Vary your anchor text slightly, and spread out your keywords across link descriptions as well as within the anchor text.

Avoiding "Spam" Linking

A recent development in link spamming is to post in forums, guest books and blogs with the explicit intent of getting links to your website. The practice is doomed to fail, because unless the context is extremely relevant (in which case forums provide an acceptable alternative) and the linking is not explicit (you shouldn't just stick your link in everywhere - match it with the current discussion, content and tie it in, otherwise leave it out.), the link will only serve to harm your website's rankings.