Google PageRank Update

This is a special post. It came to me as a surprise that today my CuteWriting has risen to a PageRank value of four from one. In the last PR update, my site had risen to one. Please read this article, I wrote on the last PR update (and a speculation that pictures may cause PR update).

What Is PageRank?

For those who don't already know about PageRank, let me clarify. It''s a measure of importance of a website, according to Google. Every site has one, a value ranging from zero to ten. The higher the rank, the better the site. PageRank determines the traffic to a site, the position it will have on searches, and its quality.

That means, a site with higher PageRank is a site with higher quality. Google determines the PageRank of a site after analyzing various factors, including DoFollow backlinks to the site, content of the site, the ease of navigation, etc. There are almost 200 factors that affect the PageRank of a site, and only a few of them are known to SEOs.

Why PageRank?

If you have a site, from which you need some profit, then you need to build traffic to the site. PageRank is a great indication of traffic to one's site. All high PR sites get lots of traffic, and hence it is very important to raise the PR of your website if you have one.

The traffic of a high PR site comes mainly from searches. Google itself places your site higher on the search results for certain search terms if your sites PR is high.

Also, the sites with low PR are not well crawled and updated by search bots. On the contrary, a link on a site with a PR of 3 or more will be readily indexed by search bots. Such links are highly valuable and can impart high traffic.

PageRank Updates

I am not sure of the duration between PageRank updates by Google. But the SEO community seems to think it's from three to four months. Every three months or so, you can see an increase or decrease of the value of your sites PR.

The last PR update for CuteWriting happened on April 30. It was then that my site rose to one from zero. Now, I am expecting to see the rise in PR for the internal pages of my blog as well.

How to Check PR?

One way to check your PR is by downloading the Google Toolbar and setting it up (view the screenshot). The toolbar can be downloaded from here.

Otherwise, you can directly check your PR from one of these sites. At some rare occasions, as in my machine, the toolbar may not show you the accurate PR of a site. In such a case, it is best to doublecheck your PR with one of these sites:

PageRank.net
QuickPageRank.com
CheckPageRank.net

So What Did I Do?

I was very much conscious about my site's rankings on the search results from the start. I built links very carefully, by soliciting popular bloggers. Thats how I could build my PR to this high within such short span. One thing you should know is you can get your site penalized if you build links rapidly in a huge amount. It's ultimately your site's value that determines your PageRank and not anything else, because a high quality site automatically gets backlinks.

One should build links in a natural way. The links from high PR sites are highly valuable to your site. So, quality is more important than quantity. Make sure you build links from high PR sites. These sites will add great value to your site.One PR5 backlink is far more valuable than a thousand PR0 backlinks. From this you can imagine the importance of quality.

More on PageRank and other Google SEO technologies can be found on these links:

Google Webmaster Guidelines
Google PR
Google on SEO
Creating a Google-friendly site

Image Credit:
Microzulo.com

Copyright © Lenin Nair 2008