SEO Made Easy - 10

The Cold Hard Facts About Google Page Rank And How To Use It To 1-Up Your Competitors!

The purpose of this lesson is to teach you the following:

  • Exactly what Google Page Rank is
  • How page rank is calculated
  • How to funnel page rank to your "money pages" (most important pages)
  • How funneling page rank properly can actually increase your website's ranking

I often find myself hearing the same questions over and over again...

Many people think Page Rank is simply where their website ranks in the search engines. Google Page Rank would then mean where they rank in Google. For example, if I had a Google Page Rank of 5, that would mean that I ranked #5 in Google for my keyword.

This is completely wrong... Google Page Rank has nothing to do with where you are ranked in Google for your specific keyword or keyword phrase.

In previous lessons we went over, very briefly, what Page Rank is and how you can view the Page Rank of your webpage. But because I'm writing this article on Google Page Rank, I'm going to quickly repeat a few things.

What is Google Page Rank?

  • Google Page Rank is simply Google's way of displaying how important a webpage is. Google assumes that when 1 webpage links to another webpage, it's actually "casting a vote" for the webpage. The more votes you have for your webpage, the more important your webpage will be.
  • Google also takes into account the importance of other website's pages linking to your own webpage. If many webpages link to the website's webpage linking to you (i.e. They have a lot of "votes") then their vote will be of more importance and will increase your Page Rank more.See images below for a visual representation of what I mean...

In the pictures below, Site A will pass more Page Rank to your website because more websites are linking (voting) for them.

Google Page Rank

Site A has 4 votes (links), therefor Site A is more important than site B which only has 2 votes (links).

For example, let's say that a town was voting on whether or not they wanted to pass a certain law. Their were 3 parties voting.

  • The Leader (Ruler)

  • The Council

  • The Citizens

Now, whose vote would count for more? I would guess that the Leader's vote would count for much more than both the council and the citizens. The leader is obviously more important that both of the others. The council and the citizens' votes would still count for something, but just not as much as the Leader's vote.

Page Rank works in a similar way. A link or "vote" from those pages that are more important will increase your page rank and "count for more" than those pages that aren't as important.

Remember, in order to tell how important a webpage is, simply count the number of pages linking (voting) to that page, AND also the importance of those pages voting for that page.

Make sense?

Google Toolbar (Yes, we've already covered this... but just for a quick refresh before we dive into the more complex stuff.)

To see the Google Page Rank of your website, you must download the Google toolbar. You can download this for free by clicking the link below: toolbar.google.com

Once you have installed the Google toolbar, it will place a toolbar within your web browser, in this case, Internet Explorer as shown below.

Google Page

Notice the small green bar that says PageRank. If you hover your mouse over the green bar, you will see your Google Page Rank as shown below.

How is Page Rank Calculated?

Ok, now let's talk about "almost" EXACTLY how page rank is calculated. Over 99% of the webmasters on the internet do not understand how Page Rank(PR) is calculated. I'm going to refer to Page Rank as PR throughout the rest of this lesson, for the sake of not having to type it over and over.

So, why does it matter how PR is calculated?

It matters because you can use this knowledge to actually funnel PR throughout your website and give different pages on your site a higher PR. The higher your PR is, the higher your webpage will rank in Google.

Here is the Google Page Rank Formula, and I'm warning you... This might get a little nerdy, but bear with me. I'll make everything very understandable.

Page Rank formula:

0.15 + (0.85*(a "share" of the PR of every webpage that links to it)) = Your Webpage's PR

0.15 = The lowest PR a webpage could ever possibly have

0.85 = A dampening factor... This is just the number that Google uses for their PR formula. 1

"Share" = the PR of the page lingking to you divided by the total number of the links on that page.

Now, let's look at a quick example.

Say we've created our website and it has 3 pages in total. For sake of making the math easy, we'll start each webpage with a page rank of 1.

  • Page A

  • Page B

  • Page C

Page Rank

None of the pages link to each other. They're just pure content webpages with no links to any other pages within our website. Let's quickly calculate the PR of our pages by using the formula above.

0.15 + (0.85*0)=.15

Because no webpages link to our pages, there is no "share of PR"... hence it is 0. So... If we do the math, we come up with a PR of .15 for each of our pages. Not very good huh?

Page Rank

Using our formula we get:

  • Page A: 0.15 + (.85*0)=.15

  • Page B: 0.15 + (0.85*(1/1))=1

  • Page C:0.15 + (.85*0)=.15

You can see that by just linking page A to page B, we've changed the PR of page B from .15 all the way up to 1. Big difference!

With our newly calculated Page Ranks for all of our pages, let's do the calculation again. By doing so, we'll slowly get to the "true page rank" of all of our pages... The more iterations we do, the more gradual the change will be between each iteration.

  • Page A: 0.15 + (.85*0)=.15

  • Page B: 0.15 + (0.85*(15/1))=.2775

  • Page C: 0.15 + (.85*0)=.15

You can see that after another iteration of our formula, the PR of page B dropped significantly... This number is closer to the actual Page Rank that Google would give page B.

Note: You can keep going through the formula and you'll notice that the change will be smaller after each iteration...

Now, let's try something different and link all pages to and from one another...

Page Rank

  • Page A: 0.15 + (0.85*(1/2))=.575

  • Page B: 0.15 + (0.85*(1/2))=.575

  • Page C: 0.15 + (0.85*(1/2))=.575

After 1 iteration the Page Rank of all pages is .575.

So, by linking ALL pages together we have maximized the page rank from within our website! You can play around with your linking throughout your website and by doing so, you can send more PR to pages you want to rank higher for, and lowering the PR of those pages you don't care much about their ranking :

This can be extremely powerful.

Was that over your head?

If so, don't despair. The first time I learned how Page Rank was calculated, I didn't understand it either. Just keep re-reading what I've written and give it a try with your webpages and it will eventually all make perfect sense.

Ready for an extremely powerful trick that I use on all of my websites?

Remember that in the Page Rank formula:

0.15 + (0.85* (a "share" of the PR of every webpage that links to) = Your Webpage's PR

The "share of PR of every webpage that links to it" is calculated by taking the current Page Rank of the webpage and dividing it by the total number of links on the page... So, by removing ALL unnecessary links on a page, you will be able to pass more Page Rank to the other pages that you link to... Why is this important? Remember, the higher the Page Rank a page has, the better it will rank.

So, what are unnecessary links? Unnecessary links could be when you link to another website (link partner) and they don't link back to you. By linking out to a "link partner", you're giving them a percentage of your Page Rank that you could be passing to other pages within YOUR website. If this "link partner" isn't linking back to your website, there is no need to ever link to them. You're just hurting your ranking by doing so!

I have seen websites move up hundreds of positions by simply looking at their links pages and making sure that their link partners are all linking back. If they're not, then you should ALWAYS remove them from your links page. In doing so, you are guaranteed to benefit from this.

A day before writing this, I went through all of my links pages and validated that all of my link partners were still linking back. If they weren't, I removed them. I checked my rankings in Google today and they gone up over 10 positions since yesterday! Yes, this could be mere coincidence, but it's happened numerous times to other websites of mine.

I can't stress enough the importance of monitoring these link partners.

Let's do an example:

Looking at this links page: http://www.practicalweightloss.com/links/herbalife.html

PracticalWeightloss.com

If we go to the page, you can see that they link out to 6 websites:

TIP: Now, we could visit each of these websites manually and search through their entire sites, which could have thousands of pages... to find our link. This could take a very long time. Again, this is where I use SEO Elite to do the hard work. All you have to do is enter the main links page: (http://www.practicalweightloss.com/links/herbalife.html) and SEO Elite will go through all of your link partners and will tell you if they're still linking back!

Remember, the purpose of doing this is IF the website is not linking back to us, we can remove their link from our webpage, thus we'd be passing Page Rank to our OWN website's pages, rather than passing that portion of Page Rank to this "link partner's" site. If they're not linking back to us (passing PR back to us) then why should WE send them some of our website's Page Rank? We shouldn't...

  1. Open up SEO Elite

  2. Select radio button 4

  3. Enter the links page into SEO Elite and click "ok"...

Once SEO Elite is finished running, it will quickly tell us whether or not these sites are still linking back to us, as shown below...

Notice that only 2 of these sites are still linking back!

They must have removed our link from their website without us knowing about it. We can remove all of the other links, and this alone will allow us to pass more PR to our own webpages within our site and will help us rank better immediately!

This is a HUGE secret that not many webmasters know about... Now, I don't want this secret getting out to everyone, so keep this to yourself. Give it a try, you can go through your links pages manually which will work just fine, or you can use SEO Elite. Either way works just as well as the other. The main thing is to DO THIS!

Final Summary

Ok, now that you've gone through this eBook, I can guarantee you that you know more than 99% of all webmaster's online. You now know how to completely smoke your competitors in the search engine war and you're virtually GUARANTEED success if you follow all of the advice taught in this course.

As I said in the beginning of this eBook, it is absolutely critical that you take this advice seriously and actually put into action EVERYTHING you've learned. Some of it may seem simple, and some might seem a bit complex, but just take everything 1 step at a time.

EVERTHING I've taught you works, and works extremely well, so now you have no excuses for grabbing that top ranking for whatever keyword you choose! Don't be that 99% of webmasters that are too lazy to actually do anything with what they learn and get out there and start dominating those search engines!

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