SEO Blog

Over the weekend, you may have noticed that some of your pages have received a little helping hand in the PageRank department. Although, if you’re anything like me, it will have had little or no impact on anything that you’re doing.

PageRank is a strength metric, nothing more. Google gives you a number from 0 – 10 based on a number of factors – most notable of which is your inbound link strength. The toolbar figure hadn’t been updated (universally at least – there were a few small updates) since April 2010. Therefore, all those figures you have been looking at since then could well be an absolute nonsense right now.

But the good news, if it can be deemed as such, is that we can now get a more accurate reading for many sites. I say ‘many’ purely because it is not yet confirmed that this is a total update or just a widespread one – the joys of Google silence. But whatever the outcome, it shouldn’t have much of an impact on what you’re doing in SEO.
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It’s all well and good going out there and sourcing links, but you can’t then chase them all up to see which ones have fallen flat and which are going along nicely. It would take too long. So how can you quicken this process up?

Well, this is where your good friend Webmaster Tools comes in. As well as offering a way to submit your sitemap and troubleshooting issues with your internal links, it is a useful resource for measuring links coming. But why is this important?
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If you’ve ever done any research into your competitors you will probably have found that some can have thousands of links, even hundreds of thousands of links, but yet they still aren’t top. The reason for this is that all links weren’t created equal.

For example, you could produce one piece of content and distribute it to dozens of sites. Each individual domain probably won’t pass on much strength in its own right, then you have to factor in penalties for duplicated content, which probably leaves you with a handful of meaningful (if weak) links.

Equally, you could sign up for an inordinate amount of free directories (there are thousands out there) and get a small link from each. Again, the likelihood is that the site itself has very little in the way of strength and what it does have is diluted by the high volume of outgoing links.
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PageRank sculpting has always been downplayed by Google. The process of deliberately no-following external links so as not to pass on ‘link juice’ is still widely practiced but not necessarily understood. I covered this in some more detail in my recent blog post – How to Get More out of Internal Linking.

It would be fair to say that all SEO types go out seeking decent followed links, for the simple reason that they provide the most value. However, that isn’t to say that there is no value at all in a no-followed link.

Links are a sign of authority. PageRank is Google’s method for providing a guideline figure for how authoritative a site is; therefore, getting links from a site with a PR of 7 is going to be more beneficial than one that doesn’t have a rank at all.
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Whilst there is plenty that you can do to improve your site under your own steam, sometimes it’s just as good getting a bit of a free ride. Finding ways of getting new links and working out what keywords to target next can be a bit of a chore, particularly when you hit a creative brick wall. So why not let your competitors do some of the legwork?

We’re all in the same boat when it comes to search engine rankings. We all want a competitive advantage and will work hard to ensure that we get to the top. Unfortunately there will always come a time where you have to find new avenues to explore and you won’t be flush with ideas. By studying a competitor’s link profile you can gain ‘inspiration’. By reviewing more competitor’s, you can be all the more inspired.

Okay, so that might sound a little underhanded, and I guess it is, but everybody is doing it all the time – your site included. Even using something freely available like Yahoo Site Explorer will give you an idea of the strong links that a site is receiving, which will allow you to find directories, blogs and websites that might be able to throw a link your way too.
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In short, because Google says so. But to say it doesn’t matter at all is a bit of an overstatement. Essentially, PageRank was always a guide of how strong a website’s linking structure was. Over the years though, as the Google algorithm developed, this guide slowly lost importance; unfortunately people still continued to give it their full attention.

PageRank has been a metric by which SEO professionals and webmasters measure the strength of a site. The higher on the 0-10 scale a site would appear, the more successful their efforts had been. But as new ranking factors were introduced, it slowly lost prominence.
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Duplicate content is one of those things that SEO professionals are always warning against. Whether you’ve got multiple domains for one site or have borrowed (or have had borrowed) some site content from elsewhere, potential pitfalls are abound.

The first problem is multi-domains. This is something that Google recently addressed by saying that you wouldn’t be directly penalised by them; however, this stops short of confirming that there is no ranking penalty due to the dissipation of linking strength.
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Getting to the top position in Google remains any website owners’ dream. Not without good reason either it has to be said. Ranking at number one for your major key terms can ensure a healthy flow of traffic; one that isn’t bound by budgets, time of the day or your geographical location.

Search engine ranking is ultimately what every site must strive for. It is the very reason that we have SEO and why that in itself is such a popular industry. But nobody has a predestined right to be at the top; you may well be the leading supplier of Brand X in the UK, but if your site doesn’t cut the search engine mustard, you’ll be almost invisible.

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If you’ve invested vast amounts of time and/or money creating the perfect design, navigation and copy for your website, you need to ensure that it’s going to get seen. It is for this reason that SEO is so important; producing a site that is not only useable but visible too.

Link building plays a vital part in the search engine optimisation process. Working in harmony with your keyword implementation (through Meta, copy and headers amongst others), inbound links can not only supply you with vital direct traffic but will also help you strengthen your website’s authority online.
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