How to Trash Your PageRank
How Important is PageRank? PageRank is a measure of how popular your site is. The PR of your site is determined by how many other sites link to you.
When crawling a site, the search engine robots will follow the links on a page, unless they are directed by HTML code to ignore the links. A vote is counted for each link they find pointing to a site. These votes tally up to equal the PR for the site. Actually there is more to it than just that but in a nutshell, this is how it works.
Each link to your homepage or another page on your site will add a bit to the PR. The PageRank of the linking site is factored into the formula, so not all votes are equal. The linking site is sort of sharing their PR with you. The vote carries more weight when it comes from a high PR site. This doesn’t mean that a link from a PR1 site will somehow hurt your PR as some would have you believe. Generally links to your site cannot hurt your PageRank.
It is not the same story for outbound links, so be very careful who you link to. Before I get too deep into that, let’s take a step back and discuss some common ways sites develop links, then we can cover the pitfalls.
Link exchanges are a common way to get links to your site. Basically you put a link on your site and another webmaster adds a link to your site on one of their pages. Linking from a page with hundreds or even thousands of unrelated links to your site is not a good plan. The “vote” would be so diluted from the other links so as to be almost meaningless. But more important, if you link back to the other site and that site ends up being “banned” by the search engines, you will be penalized for pointing to a banned site. This will kill your PageRank!
You should keep an eye on your linking partners for two very important reasons. First, make sure they are still linking to you. Second, make sure they have not been banned. if your link is gone, contact them and ask for it to be replaced. if however, you find that the other site has been banned you should immediately remove their link from your site. If you continue to link to a banned site, your PR will suffer.
Linking is an important SEO strategy and as long as you keep an eye on your link partners it makes sense to exchange links. A better strategy, or one to use in addition, is generating one way links to your site. These are links that other sites put up that point to your site without you having to link to them. There are many ways to develop these one way links. Remember, they can never hurt you because, in theory, you have no control over them. Here are 4 ways to get links back to your site.
1. Post comments on public forums, articles, blogs, etc. with a link to your site.
2. Submit your original content to social bookmarking sites like StumbleUpon, Technorati, or any of the hundreds of other social sites on the net.
3. Submit articles on your topic to article databases and include a link to your site in the article resource box.
4. Pay for them. Although this is not my favorite way to develop them, it is available.
When you develop a linking strategy and stick to it you will quickly develop more links to your site than you would think. This will improve your PageRank, and it will help drive traffic to your site.
Rob Emmerson has helped hundreds of webmasters with SEO questions. He now offers a free 7 day SEO course . In addition you can get more useful SEO tips and tricks at Rob Emmerson’s SEO Blog.
