How to Improve Naturally the PageRank

Questions about Google's PageRank, and ranking in general, and how to gain some points, by natural ways, without to use bad practices as cloaking and spamming and other forbidden artifacts that may lead you to the black list...

What is PageRank?

PageRank, or website ranking, is a notation from 0 to 10, given by Google to each page of a website.
The higher is this value, the better will be the position of the page in results of searches, among other pages that match the request.
A 5 points PageRank is Good. 7 points may be reached with valuable backlinks. The number of 10 points PageRank websites is very short!
The word PageRank comes both from "page ranking" and "Page" that is the name of one of the two authors of the algorithm (Serguey Brin and Larry Page).

Is PageRank important?

According to Google, PageRank is the more important among 100 criteria to order pages in results of searches.
Thus, it is not the only one. But for websites that match a same group of keywords, it is very important.

How is calculated PageRank by Google?

The value of PageRank doesn't depend upon the content of the page, but only of links to the page instead.
Links in the page towards other website is important also.
Links to a page are considered as a vote for this page. But the value of this vote depend of the PageRank of the page that emits it.
The PageRank of a page is transmitted to linked page but the added value is divided by the number of links. If a page links to ten pages, the added value of the vote is divided by ten.
The ranking of a page depends upon of ranking of backlinks, and also ranking of other pages it links.

(From the article "Deeper inside PageRank" by A.N. Langville et C.D. Meyer)

What is cloaking?

This is creating alternate pages that are read by crawlers (robots of search engines) but not by human readers. These hidden pages are full of keywords to improve search results.
When cloaking is detected the website goes to the blacklist, their pages are no longer indexed. See "bmw.de" et "ricoh.de" affairs (same webmaster?)

What is spamming?

This is putting lot of hidden links into a web page (inside "no script" tags for example) to make more links to a friend website and improve its ranking. Once spamming is recognized, the two websites goes to the blacklist.

What is spoofing?

This is redirecting a page to a page in another website with a high PageRank, and this result in the source page to get the PR of the destination. The redirection is achieved by the use of the "refresh" meta tag. Visitors see the current page, but search engines see only the target page with the high PR.
This is known as a bug in the calculation of the PR, and is probably fixed now.

How to know my PageRank?

Just install Google's toolbar on your browser. The PageRank of each page is displayed when you visit your website.
But this is a kind of mean as PageRank depends upon a group of keywords. To know the real ranking, perform searches with various keywords. The position of your page (when several match the request) gives the ranking: the top of list means for a ranking of 10. First page of search results means for 6-9 PR when lot of matches exists.
This website can also display the PageRank of your site.

A company guarantees me a 10 points PR.

I have been contacted by a company and it guarantees me a 10 points PR, and I want to improve my ranking. Should I accept?
According to Google, nobody can garantee a PageRank, for any position. (And I know only a dozen of big websites with a 10 PR).

Is the PageRank the first factor for the position?

Matt Cutts is the member of the Google's SEO staff who communicates the most often on medias about the algorithm. He said in an interview published on the Stonetemple site, in Octobre 8, 2007:

I would certainly say that the links are the primary way that we look at things now in terms of reputation.

Links are the source of the PageRank, according their weight and their number, and they are the first factor for the reputation of the document, which in turn is certainly the first factor for the position in results.

How to improve my PageRank (PR)?

  1. Put internal links between pages of your website.
  2. Avoid to put too much links on a same page (towards your pages or to external websites).
    Too much links will raise the PageRank of your page and even your whole website.
  3. Avoid the "nofollow" attribute, example: <a http://www.sitexxx.com rel="nofollow" >The site</a>, or lose 2 points of PageRank.
  4. Unless it is a new page, not evaluated yet, don't put a link to a page with a 0, 1 or 2 PageRank.
    You need for external links anyway, this is part of the content and content is more important than PageRank.
  5. Put an unique link on a page, to a friend website, rather than a link among several ones
  6. Get quality backlinks. Apart Dmoz and Yahoo, directories are not interesting. Write articles for magazines with backlinks to your website. See the article "How to obtain backlinks".
  7. Create interesting and unique content. Let it known by other websites to gain backlinks from them.
  8. A page must have an unique, well-defined topic. PR depends upon a group of keywords.
  9. Add more pages to your website (but with different contents).
  10. Be patient. You have to wait for months before you can view the effects of your work.

Other factors for the position in results.

PageRank, that is based upon backlinks, is only one factor among several ones, to calculate the position of link to your website, in results of search engines.
These factors are also considered:
- The localization of the host and the language of the request.
- Clicks on the link to your website rather than other links in results. Your page must be chosen. Imagine good title and description, clear and attracting.
- The number of keywords. This is used first to select a page, and then to calculate its position in the list.

A more complete list is given in the Google patent.

Links about PageRank

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