All webmasters know that PageRank is one of the most important features of a website that reveals its importance and popularity. In fact, Google uses the PageRank algorithm to display the most relevant search results. It’s worth noticing that PageRank is what made Google the best search engine. Nowadays, webmasters are crazy about PageRank since Google is one of the best, free traffic machines.
Since everyone wants to get the highest PageRank they can possibly achieve, people ask a various questions about PageRank on popular forums. Such as, “How’s PageRank calculated?”, “What factors have impact on PageRank?”, “What factors have no impact at all?”, “Will my site get PageRank (insert your desired PageRank here.)?”, “What are the ranking factors?”.
I plan to write a series of articles to answer people’s questions about PageRank.
In this article, I will talk about factors that have impact on PageRank and factors that have no impact at all.
What Factors Have Impact On PageRank?
• I was very surprised when I learned the process of adding new pages to a web site can actually decrease your PR value. It occurs simply because your existing pages will lose their PR value to new pages. It’s very interesting that large sites, that contain a lot of pages and information, are much less likely to lose significant PR amount rather than small sites.
• Backlinks from related and valuable sites are the most significant when PageRank value is assigned and calculated. Furthermore, a link from a good site shows to Google that your site is significant and thus should be given a high PageRank value.
• If you link to a site that’s banned by Google, it’s highly possible that your site will be banned as well. So the next time you think about linking to a site, always check if it’s banned by Google or not.
• Do you still think that your high PageRank will guarantee you only top positions in the search engines? If you are then you are wrong. Google examines content of a website and shows the most relevant website for your query and PageRank is not as important as you might think. You can get a perfect example of it when you search for the term, “strongest directories”, in Google.
What Factors Have No Impact On PageRank?
• The process of updating your web site more frequently is defiantly not going to increase your PageRank. If your site is updated regularly, all you will get from Google is crawler’s love. What I mean by “crawler’s love” is the process when Google comes to your site for the content almost daily. What really matters for PageRanks are backlinks but not fresh content.
• Having a nice design is not going to guarantee you a good PageRank. A good design can improve user friendliness and thus you will experience more traffic. However, Google doesn’t value your site’s design when it assigns PageRank.
• Sub pages of your web site should not necessarily have lower PageRank than root categories since PageRank is assigned to all pages individually. For example, one of your pages on your site might have higher PageRank than the home page simply because more links are pointed to that link.
• The Meta-Tags, which are used most of the time to define a site and provide it’s relevant keywords, do not increase PageRank value. Moreover, those Meta-Tags are used to help search engines find out what a site is about and its related keywords.
• Last but not least are nofollow links, which unfortunately do not increase your PageRank as well. Nofollow links are used most of the time to link to certain website without assigning it a PageRank value. The most common use of this practice falls among bloggers. They often use nofollow links to help their readers access a certain site easily, while telling search engines that the link with nofollow attribute shouldn’t be indexed.
