Google PageRank: How to Define, Determine and Get

Despite the complexity of the balloon diagram to your right and the ridiculously complex articles that you may have seen about Google PageRank, there is a 10 cent definition with all the information that you need:

“PageRank is the number and importance of websites that link to your website” – Matt Cutts, Google Employee

Get Good Links, Get Good PageRank

Got that? The more high-quality websites that you have linking to you, the better off you will be and the higher rankings that you will have on Google. (As an SEO purist, I must tell you that High PageRank is not always identical to high Google rankings, but for the most part the two are highly related).

How can you get more links? You could create 100 blogs and have them link to you and not get much Google benefit. Why? They are not quality websites. They would be spam blogs or Splogs and they are one of the reasons that Google devised the PageRank system. Google found that low-quality spam websites were making it into their search rankings and they need to get rid of them.

Google search is largely a computer-driven algorithm (you can’t rank billions of websites by hand) so Google needed a mathematical way of calculating rankings, thus “PageRank” was created. New blogs and websites, with few links and little unique content could get an automatic “0″ score and no longer affect the ranking.

What is a quality website link? Imagine for a moment that you have only one link to your website and it is from the front page of the New York Times online. That one link would likely skyrocket you to the top of your specific niche. Why? The New York Times is an important website. According to Alexa the New York Times is one of the top 150 websites in the United States. And Google knows that all links from that site are vetted by a real person (i.e. they are not spam links) and so Google can trust that the NY Times is linking to an “important” site. Of course, there would be other benefits if you get a link from the NY TImes. You are also going to get many visitors and many new links from other websites, compounding the effect.

Human-Edited Links for PageRank

Pay attention to what I wrote above: “Google knows that links from that site are vetted by a real person.” In the old days of SEO, when the raw number of links was the main criteria, automated systems would create 1000′s of links and 1000′s of splogs, and legitimate websites would trade links to get a higher ranking. PageRank allows Google get rid of the influence of spam websites and to give some of the top websites, and some of the top website directories greater impact. It knows that top directories have a real person reviewing each website, filtering out the spam and porn and other less desirable website.

That’s why if you are serious about SEO, you need to be in some of the top directories such as these:

1) Yahoo Directory https://ecom.yahoo.com/dir/submit/intro/ The best link that money can buy.

2) ODP – Open Directory Project – DMOZ
Submit: http://dmoz.org/add.html Free, but can be hard to get into.

3) Best of the Web Directory BOTW and BOTW Blog Directory: http://botw.org (affiliate link) Various options from $75 – $300

4) JoeAnt.com If you are on a budget, one of the best and cheapest links that you can get (currently $39.95).

Those are not the only ones, of course. That’s just a sample of dozens that you can use. Just getting a few links may help you get higher PageRank and..what you really want…a higher Google ranking. But if you are in a competitive industry, you will need many more links. You will want links from trade associations, important bloggers, local directories and any other website that you can find that is related to your business.

The process of link-building is a complex topic which we will explore later. For now, just remember the simple idea that you want a large variety of high-quality websites linking to you, so that you can achieve a high PageRank and higher rankings on Google.