Thursday, August 17th, 2006
A flaw in the calculation of PR is that dangling links completely destory the model - it’s unclear where the weight of the site should be distributed, and as such it decreases the cumulative integrity of the model. Dangling links are purely pages with no links going away from them, thus no where to send the PR, and no way to calculate it’s effective value.
Dangling links can exist either from pages with no links (frequently information popups, or definition pages) or from pages which have not yet been downloaded. To deal with the issue, Google simply removes said pages from the system until all PageRanks are calculated - then reincludes them for the final calculation.
Dangling links decrease your PageRank “potential” because they aren’t included in the calculation, the easiest way to avoid dangling links, and as such increase PR potential is to make every page have a link to the homepage, either by means of the logo, or a simple “Home” link.
Thursday, August 17th, 2006
Adding new content is key to the success of any site: sites grow almost entirely based on their content. More content means more links, more traffic, more time spent on your site, etc. But, in addition, a PageRank increase is seen from every new page - while the increase is rather insignificant on it’s own, larger amounts of content, and more PR, allows for more PR spread, more links around the site, and as such more PR.
Remember, PageRank is retained internally, internal links still transfer PageRank, and PR doesn’t “disappear” when sent to new pages, rather just spreads to that new page - so more pages will link back to the origin pages, Then the origin pages, link back to them, and theoretically, you have a recursing PR loop - of course, after normalization the recursion is irrelevant.
Thursday, August 17th, 2006
Probably not. But a side effect of trying to increase your PageRank is more inbound links, and inbound links (with relevant text, and such) are very important in your SEO efforts for all search engines, not just the goliath G.
So what should you be focusing on? Focus on getting more links to your site, more links means more traffic. One-way links are worth more than reciprocated links, though links on pages with fewer links are worth the most by far. Getting featured on a big name site such as Digg, Cnet , Slashdot, or any other well known news source makes for a very, very interesting bump in search rankings - albeit, a little short term.
Remember, links grow “stale” after a period of time, and slowly lose their value - so link building should be an on-going, ever growing task.
Thursday, August 17th, 2006
Ha. Well, since the PageRank algorithm is rather simple, the methods for increasing it are too… in fact, very simple. All you need to do to increase PR is increase the number of inbound links from other sites with high PR.
Ah, but that’s not so easy. You have to find people willing to link to you - forums work very poorly due to the huge C() value (number of links outbound), most free-for-all linking sites have the same problem… so what does one do? A common practice is to participate in link exchanges - these are usually frowned upon by search engine purists, but truly, there’s nothing wrong with doing link exchanges - other than it means you have to increase your number of outbound links.
Theoretically, sitewide links should have the same effect as adding substantially more pages to your site, where as links page links have a much more restricted, direct effect. If given the option, links page links are probably the best. There are a few simple tweaks you can make to improve the effectiveness of link exchanges, such as refining your linking structure, and such - though, most are less worth the time than spending on other promotion efforts will be.
Another benefit of link exchanges is the traffic boost, while usually small, a substantial number of links means a substantial amount more traffic - get to work exchanging with valuble sites, and you’ll see your search rankings, PR and traffic all increase.
Another way to increase PageRank is simply to redesign your site to stream your existing PR to where you want it - remember that by manipulating the number of links on your page, you can decide which links get the most value.
Thursday, August 17th, 2006
PageRank is actually a really simple concept. Defined by the simple equation PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn)), where “d” is a dampening factor, t1-tn are the links inbound, and C() is a function to determine the number of outbound links on a page.
Effectively, one page’s PageRank is distributed evenly across all it’s outbound links - whether duplicate outbound links are filtererd is unknown, but likely to prevent PR-spread weighting.
So what does it do? At the spawn of Google, it was the main method for determining website “worth”, it made each link a “vote” for a website, and each vote effected how much a site’s vote is worth - a perfect spam filter. PageRank worked near perfect, Google’s SERPs were hundreds of times more accurate than the non-PR based engines.
No longer does Google base their algorithm almost entirely on PR, though it’s still important in SEO, and frequently a heavily discussed topic among SEO-involved webmasters. Webmasters are always interestesd in increasing their PageRank, even if it is simple as a method of comparing each other’s worth.
PageRank is accessible on the Google Toolbar, as well as a range of PR checker websites. The major fault with PageRank from an SEO perspective is that it’s all behind the scenes, while toolbar PR is available, it’s normalized to a scale of 1-10 (which hides a lot of value information, that we’re sure is kept behind the scenes) and is only updated once in a blue moon. The PageRank you see today is likely not the PR that’s actually in effect in the SERPs this instance.