Monday, July 17, 2006

Google Page Rank Changes to Note

Everyone I know has been affected by Google's latest Page Rank changes. Many people who follow what I do are happy to see the shake-out. But, it's been a confusing past seven days.

Pages that have done poorly, gained PR's of 4. Pages that were supposedly quality, dropped to zero. Why?

First, remember that Page Rank is figured by inbound links. The links must be quality links. Google figures that if you have quality inbound links, your page must be important. They know you can't control the inbound links, which is why it really doesn't matter if a bunch of crappy sites happen to link to you.

But Page Rank does care who YOU link to.

If your outbound links tie you to crappy sites, i.e. zero Page Rank with poor quality content, then your score will be lower.

I believe the PR run is almost done now. So, there isn't much to do immediately to improve your rank. However, now is the time to start building a linking strategy - and here's what you should consider:
  • Find sites that are listed in the search engines.
  • Sites that have a PR of 2 but not more than 5.
  • Sites that don't hide their link pages. Make sure a spider could crawl from the home page to the links page without a problem.
  • Sites on the same topic as yours.
  • Honest, white hat webmasters. Do a "view source" on their pages and look for no-follows or other black hat tactics.
Next, I'll talk about why some high ranking PR sites show up lower in the search engines than sites with less PR. Until then, start your linking strategy now and be ready for the next Google Page Rank update.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi, Dave! I am new to this whole AdSense thing, and you're site is a big help. Do you have any more advice maybe? My blog is here: http://yoshinoxtsuna.blogspot.com

I am not sure if my stuff, links, etc are okay... ??

Charisa

Dave Jackson said...

You know, Charisa, you probably have one of the safest blogs I've seen. Most people go overboard with the links and AdSense blocks that the page looks more like a bad newspaper.

One of the reasons I don't subscribe to our local Naples Daily News is because it is over 40% advertisements. You have to really get creative to find good content.

Of course, it shouldn't be that way. The paper, and your blog, should have a natural flow, and the ads should be a benefit - not an stumbling block.

If it looks overdone - it probably is.

Yours looks great! Congrats.