PageRank: How to Rank Well with Google
on June 9th, 2010 at 2:56 am
When trying to find information on the internet, you typically go to a search engine. When using the most popular search engine, Google, a user enters a query, Google’s machines search their index for matching pages and return the results that are the most relevant to the user. Google determines relevancy by over 200 factors, one of critical factors is the PageRank (PR) for a given page. PageRank is the measure of the importance of a page based on the incoming links from other pages. In more detail, PR can be calculated using a simple iterative algorithm, and corresponds to the principal eigenvector of the normalized link matrix of the web, i.e., that sums up all backlinks and their associated ranking weight. We assume page A has pages T1…Tn which point to it (i.e., are citations)[1]. The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. We usually set d to 0.85. Also C(A) is defined as the number of links going out of page A.
PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))
Note that the PageRanks form a probability distribution over web pages, so the sum of all web pages’ PageRanks will be one. Also, a PageRank for 26 million web pages can be computed in a few hours on a medium size workstation. There are many other details which are beyond the scope of this article.
In simple terms, each link to a page on your site from another site adds to your site’s PageRank. Not all links are equal: Google works hard to improve the user experience by identifying spam links and other [black-hat] practices that negatively impact search results. The best types of links are those that are given based on the quality of your content. It is not the quantity of backlinks, but the quality of backlinks that help you rank better in Search Engines. Having backlinks from unrelated or “bad” sites can actually penalize your ranking. Also a 1,000 poor quality backlinks may have less weight than 1 high quality backlink. Quality is very important in creating your backlinks.
How to determine a quality backlink?
A quality backlink will have these characteristics:
- The theme of the backlinking website is similar to your website or web page
- The backlink’s anchor text has the keyword or keyphrase that you are optimizing for
- The backlinking webpage has a Google PageRank (important for Google SEO) of 1 or higher (the higher the better)
- The backlinking webpage has few outgoing links, the fewer the better (see above equation as to why)
In order for your site to rank well in search results pages, it’s important to make sure that Google can crawl and index your site correctly. WebPaws.com uses Google’s Webmaster Guidelines and white-hat techniques using some of the best practices that can help your website avoid common pitfalls and improve your site’s ranking.
[1] The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, by Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page, 1998, Computer Science Department, Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305, USA
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I’m interested in making my own music blog and I’m constantly looking through many music blogs throughout the day finding new music first before other people that I know. But how exactly do those blogs find that music first? Can I really start by just posting the music I find on other blogs?.
Yes. That is the manual way and the most common way to do it. You can write a script to look for new music on the internet using date and file type requirements to automate this process, but you would not be able to leave valuable input/insights, etc, that give more value to your music posts.