Improving your Google Page Rank

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No sooner than I had posted Technorati: The Six Month Link Window when I heard that some bloggers are noticing that their Google Page Rank has dramatically descended. If you are among them then maybe these blogging tips and blogging tools will be exactly what you need to improve your page rank but, first, a definition is in order.

Page Rank calculation is Google’s way of deciding relative importance of a webpage. PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Google calculates a page’s importance from the votes cast for it. How important each vote is is taken into account when a page’s PageRank is calculated. It matters because it is one of the factors that determines a page’s ranking in the search results. It isn’t the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.

Source: Google’s PageRank explained and how to make the most of it

My blogging tips:

  1. Learn from the experts.
  2. Check, maintain and tracks your links.
  3. Use relevant keywords in titles and in the body of blog posts. Use Google Suggest. As you type into the search box, Google Suggest guesses what you’re typing and offers suggestions in real time. This is similar to Google’s “Did you mean?” feature that offers alternative spellings for your query after you search, except that it works in real time. By suggesting more refined searches up front, Google Suggest can make your searches more convenient and efficient by keeping you from having to reformulate your query. Google Suggest might offer suggestions that you will find novel or intriguing.
  4. Validate your html in your draft posts and clean it up prior to publication.
  5. Validate the html on your front page and correct all errors.
  6. Register with the search engines, set up a Google Webmaster Account, verify your blog and submit a sitemap and use Google webmaster tools
  7. Use the resources at Google Webmaster Center.
Automatically inform Google when you update your pages
Google Webmaster Tools provide you with detailed reports about your pages’ visibility on Google. To get started, simply add and verify your site, and you’ll start to see information right away.
Discover your links and see how users are reaching your site
View, classify, and download comprehensive data about internal and external links to your site with our new link reporting tools.
Enhance and increase traffic to your site
Learn which queries drive traffic to your site, and see exactly how users arrive there.
Learn more at Webmaster Central
Visit our Webmaster Blog, Help Center and more. Get the latest news and info on webmaster issues and browse through hundreds of frequently asked questions.

Tips from Experts

These are the positive factors that Google’s algorithm takes into consideration:

1. Keyword Use In Title Tag
2. Global Link Popularity Of The Site
3. Anchor Text Of Incoming Links
4. Link Popularity Within The Site
5. Age Of The Site

These are the negative factors that Google’s algorithm takes into consideration:

1. Server Is Often Inaccessible To Googlebot
2. Content Which Is Very Similar Or Duplicate to Existing Content On The Web
3. External Links To Low Quality Sites
4. Participation In Link Schemes or Actively Selling Links
5. Duplicate Meta Tags On More Pages

Google Optimization – Key Factors

1. Write blog content for your readers – not for search engines but do be consistent when it comes to your branding.
2.  Make sure your new pages deep link to your old ones (related posts).
3. Verify ownership of your site with the major search engines. Submit your site to Google, Yahoo, Bing and Ask for site verification and make sure you have submitted a sitemap for your blog.
4. Use title and sub-title optimization.
5. Use but do not overuse relevant keywords in your posts and tagging. Take the time to examine and carefully select anchor text when you link to related posts within your niche knowing that links to your sources are important for at least four reasons: Verifiability, Acknowledgment, Examples, Context.
6. Optimize your images.
7. Submit your site to selected forums, online groups and web-directories with high PageRanks.
8. Use robot.txt files to prevent non-relevant content from being scanned.

Optimising your images

  1. Google seems to prefer images of a reasonable resolution, and that makes sense because so do people. If you have to use small thumbnails on your page, make it link to a bigger image of 800×600 or bigger.
  2. Name images in the format “/images/my-image.jpg”
  3. Do not rename or move an image unless you really have to. The Google image bot is very slow at indexing images, so by renaming an image it may disappear out of Google for 6+ months.
  4. No upper case filenames (nothing to do with SEO, but for your peace of mind when you move that Windows site to Linux)
  5. NO SPACES in filenames
  6. Use rewriting where images are dynamic
  7. Name your image to match the phrase you want to be found for, where appropriate
  8. Use relevant alt attributes on the images that include the phrase you want to target. Try to include the phrase in the alt attribute and filename
  9. Use the search phrase in text in close proximity to the image. A caption below the image is perfect. Source: Just because Google hates your site doesn’t mean it hates your images.

Related posts:
How to structure a reader and search engine friendly blog
How to: Google site verification (superceded)
How to fix alt and title image tags in the new wordpress.com
Why, how and where to create a site map

add to del.icio.us :: Add to Blinkslist :: add to furl :: Digg it :: add to ma.gnolia :: Stumble It! :: seed the vine :: reddit :: furl :: TailRank

73 thoughts on “Improving your Google Page Rank”

  6. hi timetheif, thanks for the information..
    i just switch to custom domain from blogspot..
    so my pagerank suddenly dropped from PR2 to PR1…
    just submitted sitemap to google…still waiting for good news..

    Reply ↓

  10. Google has dissapointed me so far. 4 months of blogging and pagerank still 0. I think a probable reason could be there are too many links in my blog. I used a free online seo tool to check url’s and it said the count is over 300 and search engines consider pages with more than 100 links as link farms. Trying to reduce the number of hyperlinks. Let’s c if it improves the situation.

    Reply ↓

  11. 53 comments for a single post. OMG!. I wonder how this is possible. Hey! I too have written a post on [a href="//freddiemaize.wordpress.com/2008/12/06/search-engine-optimization-for-your-wordpress-and-blogspot-blogs/”" rel="nofollow"]how to optimize your blog for search engines. Hope it would be of some use and Yeah, you have a terrific blog. I ll surly come back.

    I forgot to say hi, so “HI”

    Freddie

    Reply ↓

  13. I learnt about the sitemaps recently and decided to find a simple and intuitive software for my website. Finally stick with sitemap writer pro! This powerful webtool generated the sitemap for my website in just seconds. Mayor search engines (Google, Yahoo, Ask, MSN, Moreover) were able to index and read my sitemaps without any problems.

    Reply ↓

  14. Pingback: Understanding Backlinks « one cool site: wordpress blogging tips

  18. your blog is proving to be one really cool site for me. i’ve a lot to learn. i had to click on almost all of the links on this post.

    btw, can i add a site map to a blogger blog???

    peace

    Reply ↓

  19. I’m sorry but I can’t give you any advice about forums. It seems to me that a forum would have a lot of outgoing links and due to the construct would have difficulty in getting enough backlinks.

    Reply ↓

  21. Hi Timethief, I found this post from a google search (grin) because I am stumped. My blog http://momreviews.net had PR2 for about 6 months, and then in the last update, went down to PR0. I didn’t change anything at all about the blog, didn’t add any advertising, didn’t participate in any link exchanges or Technorati or Do Follow “trains” or anything like that. I have a sitemap, I use webmaster tools, I use good titles for my posts and photos-any other suggestions would be so greatly appreciated!

    Reply ↓

  24. @miki
    I can tell you that if you think link exchanges are the way to build PR then you are off track. I can also tell you that wordpress.com blogs are not allowed to have blogger initiated advertising of any kind on them and I can tell the subject matter of your blog (make money blog) means it would be better suited to the Blogger community than the wordpress.com community. http://faq.wordpress.com/2005/12/08/adsense/

    Reply ↓

  27. how much the contents of the blog affect pagerank.
    like if i have software cracks and pirated ebooks in my blog, should i expect any pagerank from google.

    Reply ↓

  30. I am sure it will work, but it sure looks like lots of hard work and also time consuming. Thanks for sharing anyways. Hopefully I will get around to implementing it soon enough.

    Reply ↓

  31. Pingback: do it because u like it, the rest is BONUS! « BaoBao’s Simple Life 包包的简单生活

  35. So just a quick question: Does a say 3 out of 10 ranking mean my site is three times better than a 1 out of 10 in the eyes of Google? Or is it more complicated than that? Can you recommend an article about this for me? Thanks, C.

    Reply ↓

  36. Consider this. In the beginning there were bloggers, sans the profit motive. Then came the opportunistic sploggers. They acquired every free hosted blogging account they could get and posted duplicate content to all the blogs. This is gaming the system and it has a negative impact on all bloggers.

    Users typically want to see a diverse cross-section of unique content when they do searches. In contrast, they’re understandably annoyed when they see substantially the same content within a set of search results.

    Google provides advice on this issue.

    Reply ↓

  37. timethief: This is very valuable information. Thank you for taking the time to format the post the way you did. It is very clean and easy to read.

    I have one question. You pointed out in #2 of ‘negative factors’ about content that is very similar or duplicate. I am wondering, my wife and I have accounts with Zimbio which allows us to “repost” our content under their ‘magazine categories’. Would this be considered duplicate content?

    Reply ↓

  44. Hi elle,
    Richard did not write this post, I did. Thanks so much for the compliment. I’m glad to hear that you find the information useful. Many bloggers are totally confused about SEO so I attempted to reduce this to a bare bones state.
    Timethief

    Reply ↓

  45. Hi Richard,

    This is a fantastic post. I know I have most definitely noticed changes in my stats and with google.. There are a very hard one to figure.. and half the time drive me crazy. This information is absolutely invaluable!! I am always searching for more ways to get up to par with SEO and more.. this will help tons.

    Thanks so very much.

    elle

    Reply ↓

  52. @Root
    SEO is a fascinating subject and I really appreciate the fact that you took the time to explain this. I know you are busy but, is there any chance that I could sweet talk you into writing a brief guest editorial at a time that’s convenient for you? :-)

    Reply ↓

  53. I am giving away valuable tradecraft here but I look at pages and the immediately descendant pages (one level down). I test for both relevance and in the descendant pages for what I call data sub sets. So on a page for *jobs* G expects sub sets in h2 tags and child pages to include things like industry sectors.

    Most of our blogs reflect our diverse and eclectic interests rather than predictable data sub sets. We can all make better use of NOINDEX and NOFOLLOW for all our junk like about pages which dilute our page relevance and arguably do not need to be listed at all.

    More globally I am beginning to think that the way we all build sites is inherently flawed from the SEO perspective. I think that better use of sitemap.xml plus more focussed navigation schemata are the way to go. The interesting thing is that the more I get into this the more I think that a lot of very old fashioned simple practises actually work wonders from the SEO perspective. Just my 2c.

    The other thing that is interesting is how many people are interested in SEO – and how much they pay for it :) The fascinating thing is how much info Google has published themselves which clearly sign posts what they want us to do. The original paper at Stanford by the Google Guys is really interesting. As is Zipf’s law.

    Reply ↓

  55. I have been doing some commercial SEO recently on some very tough and challenging projects. It has made me revisit everything I thought I knew about search engines and restructure it from the ground up. Things like *keyword density* are not very informative in isolation – without understanding Zipf’s (sp) law for instance. I think blogging poses serious difficulties for SEO for a number of reasons – not the least of which is that the blog platform often does not behave in an optimal way. I have started to analyse pages and the pages they link too in tandem. It is very revealing.

    Reply ↓

  56. Hi there,
    The way you find out what Google has on your site, in other words, to determine the posts that have been spidered and indexed and are now searchable is to type site:normaljoe.wordpress.com into the Google search bar. Notice that there is no space following the colon. The result you get back is site:normaljoe.wordpress.com

    The way you determine how many links the site has, according to Technorati is to type in normaljoe.wordpress.com and when you do that you get these results normaljoe.wordpress.com
    There you can see the number of “reactions” received to your posts which is 2. The Authority is currently 2 but the question mark indicates that it’s still under review Authority: 2 ? and by clicking the ? mark you get Info on how authority is calculated http://support.technorati.com/faq/topic/71?replies=1.
    You say you have a Google account. Do you mean a WebMasters account? And have you verified your blog with Google? This is how to do that is found here How to: Google Site Verification

    Verification:
    (1) Sign into your Google Webmaster’s account.

    (2) Get ready to write a new PAGE (not a Post) in your blog

    (3) Ask Google to verify your Blog by clicking the “verify” in your Google WebMaster’s account.

    (4) You will be given a code. Paste on the title (subject) the exact code that you get from Google Webmaster Tools option “Upload an HTML file” (this is the verification method you have to choose). Example of the code:
    google4f645e3adsdaa48g3a41z.html

    (5) Click to publish the Page.

    I hope this is what you are looking for but if you need more help then just post again.

    Reply ↓

  57. Thanks to you, there seem to be some wonderful tips on this. I guess my comment is more of a question than anything. Improving all this does what exactly? I’m assuming that it gives you a better chance at being randomly discovered when someone enters a Google search? I hear the term “Google page ranking” and I do have a Google account- so how do I find out if I’m like last on their list or whatever?
    any way time thanks for all the effort and time that you have put in to this site….it has helped me on more than one occasion with other problems.

    DB

    Reply ↓

  58. Pingback: How to structure a reader and search engine friendly blog « one cool site: wordpress blogging tips

  59. @One and all
    For a blogger like myself, who does not gain any income whatsoever from blogging, there is nothing more rewarding than receiving “thank yous”.

    I’m so happy that you found the blogging tips in this post to be helpful. And, I’m delighted that you took the time to say so.

    Happy Blogging!

    Reply ↓

  67. I didn’t know that my small blog would be ranked number 4. I have a friend who has nearly 100,000 hits and is on the same rank as I am. I think that I am going to continue blogging since I have the longest running Clubpenguin blog that is still active. All of the others have been shut down, like Paintboy100, who used a text widget to generate his blog hits.

    Reply ↓

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