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Autoresponders = Automatic Internet Marketing Success
Copyright 2005 Glenn McDonald
What if you could send out all the information that your potential customers have requested without checking your email or answering a phone? While this may seem impossible, it is becoming more and more popular among...
Creating Your 24/7 Online Selling System - The Basics
Becoming successful in the online world is no different than becoming successful offline. It requires vision, determination, and hard work.
The online world offers many exciting opportunities due to its new, fresh, and exciting field. And...
Identify your Target Market by Tracking and Exploiting Profitable Search Engine Keyword Phrases.
There's a very lucrative "marketing formula" to targeting prospects on the Internet with "laser-beam"-like precision.
Unlike savvy marketers, most Internet businesses focus on generic "single-word" keywords, other than keyword phrases...
New Medium, New Rules
Life is thought to have begun on Earth somewhere around three billion years ago, and of all the species, only an estimated one in a thousand is still alive today. Academics continue to debate over whether this is a natural part of the...
What should I sell On-Line
One of the first things you will have to decide when setting up an Internet business is whether you want to sell a product or a service, both of which have their advantages and disadvantages. Products: Advantage: unlimited income potential because...
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Link Popularity and PageRank (PR) misconceptions and facts
In this article I'll try to demystify Link Popularity and
PageRank, or PR, clarify some common misconceptions and tell you
how things work, in plain English, with facts and examples. Link
Popularity is based on the premise that people link to good
sites, and if a lot of people link to your site, then it must be
good. In plain English, if other sites are linking to your site,
your site is popular, therefore it is useful and deserves a
boost in rankings, so people can find it faster and easier.
Link Popularity is not specific to Google only, but was adopted
by the vast majority of Search Engines.
Link Popularity is only one of the many factors (good content,
number of pages, text, anchors, internal links, static URLs,
keywords, meta tags, and many, many others) that are used in
calculating your place in a search result page (ultimately, this
is what all of it is about - how findable you are in a search).
PageRank (PR) is specific to Google and is a trademarked
proprietary algorithm. There are many variables in the formulas
used by Google, but PageRank is primarily affected by the number
of links pointing to the page, the number of internal links
pointing to the page within the site and the number of pages in
the site.
PageRank focuses strictly on the quantity of links and is
directly influenced by the PageRank of the pages that are linked.
In Google, Link Popularity puts more emphasis on the quality of
links (ex. links from sites related to yours by topic or by
industry rank much higher than links from non-related sites).
PageRank - as the name suggests - is specific to a web page, not
to a web site. Every page on your site has a PageRank and every
one is different, based mostly on your linking system. Generally
- but not always - the goal is to achieve maximum PageRank on
your main page, the one people hit when first entering your site.
You can check the PR of a page by installing the Google toolbar
in Internet Explorer (the "official" way), a PR checker
extension in Firefox, or by using one of the many online
utilities, such as the one at
http://www.bsleek.com/tools/link_popularity.php (which also
checks Link Popularity and presence in DMOZ).
In Google only, PageRank is one of the factors that influence
Link Popularity.
PageRank (PR), developed by Google founders Larry Page and
Sergey Brin at Stanford University is considered to be the heart
of Google's software. PageRank solves an equation of more than
500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Instead of counting
direct links, PageRank interprets a link from Page A to Page B
as a vote for Page B by Page A. PageRank then assesses a page's
importance by the number of votes it receives and by the PR of
the page which casts the vote.
There are two types of incoming links that can effectively
contribute to increasing your Link Popularity: 1. Links from
other sites that focus on the same keyword phrases you do. In
other words, if a site that can be found in search engines by
using a search phrase like "corporate cd-rom presentations"
links to your site, and your site actually specializes in
designing interactive media, like CDs or DVDs, then that link
will help your Link Popularity. But if your site is about
selling onions, then the mentioned link will be useless.
2. Links from relevant categories in major directories
industry-specific directories and portals. The most important
major directory is DMOZ (who feeds data to many others) and is
the toughest to get in. Submission is free and there are
actually people reviewing your site. The waiting times are in
the months order, so my advice is submit and forget. The
industry-specific directories are very important. For example,
if you make interactive media, and list your site in a directory
dedicated to graphic design or media under the appropriate
category, then search engines like Google will pick that up as
an incoming link and will increase your Link Popularity. Listing
your site in such a directory is very useful to your potential
visitors, and this is what Google is trying to emulate with its
software. Remember, with Google and many others, there are no
humans reviewing your pages, but software acting under very
specific and strict rules (algorithms).
Both types of links I described above can be unilateral or
reciprocal ("you link to me and I link to you").
Reciprocal links are subject of controversy and misconception
today. Many people think that exchanging links with sites is the
easiest way to get them, new people learning about link
popularity are under the mistaken belief that they must have
links that are reciprocated on their site. Still many others are
saying that reciprocal links are dead and that not only you
won't gain any benefit from them, but
your PR (Page Rank) will
decrease (your page will "leak PR", as it is said in the SEO
circles). Both camps are not entirely correct. You certainly
don't need to get reciprocal links, but you can if you want to.
Remember, it is links pointing to your site that are the helpful
ones. Links pointing from your site to other sites are wonderful
to have because they help your visitors find related stuff, but
if your site doesn't lend itself to linking to other sites, then
by all means, don't do it. You need to do what's right for your
company or hobby and your site visitors, first and foremost.
Links from sites that have nothing to do with yours will
definitely not help you gain Link Popularity, but might produce
a temporary boost in PR (PageRank).
If the PR (PageRank) boost is only temporary, why bother?
You should try to boost your PR (PageRank) even if temporary,
because when Google sends Googlebot, its indexing robot, to
spider your website, the bot is instructed not to crawl your
site too deep unless it has a reasonable amount of PR
(PageRank). But in order to increase your overall PR (PageRank)
and, in order to have all your keywords from all your pages
available for searches, you need Google to look at all of your
pages, because the number of pages and the internal links affect
PR (PageRank). But Google will not see your internal links and
your keywords if only few pages are indexed, so you see, it's
catch 22 and the best way to win this is to start working on
your incoming links as early in the game as possible.
To see which pages from your website are actually indexed by the
search engines, you can use the following search with the major
three (Google, MSN and Yahoo!): site:www.yourdomain.com, where
www.yourdomain.com is the full address of your site. There is no
space between site: and the address, otherwise you are actually
searching for the words site: and www.yourdomain.com.
To get a glimpse of your site's Link Popularity, use the
following search with Google and MSN: link:www.yourdomain.com.
Again, there is no space between link: and the address. There is
a common misconception regarding this. People think that the
correct format is with the space, as it might produce a lot more
results. It is incorrect, as the format with the space merely
looks for www.yourdomain.com and the word link:, but will not
actually show you who really links to you. For Yahoo!, you'll
have to use the full URL, including http://.
Please note that Google might not display all the links to your
site that are stored into its database. Don't panic. It has been
reported that this is reminiscence from Google's paranoia days,
when the search engine's execs did not want competitors to
figure out the way they track Link Popularity.
As a word of caution, please do not waste your money on
submitting your sites to "hundreds of FFA sites". Free-For-All
sites are not considered quality links today. This approach
might have worked years ago, but search engines are constantly
trying to stop any activity they consider as spamming, designed
to artificially inflate numbers. This is actually a great thing,
as it keeps the internet a fair and happy place.
Two more words of caution:
1. If you read SEO (Search Engine Optimization) related
articles, please make sure you read stuff as recent as possible,
as things change.
2. Major search engines, especially Google, keep their
algorithms (rules) in deep secret. Therefore, you'll probably
wonder why you are reading so many different opinions, sometimes
conflicting. The answer is simple, because little is actually
known to the public about the deep inner workings of a search
engine.
In general, there's no need for the average site to obsess over
link popularity. Contrary to popular belief, link popularity
constitutes only a portion of most search engines' ranking
algorithms. Arguably, Google places more emphasis than most
other engines on incoming links at this point in time. How much
these actually boost a site's ranking is debatable and truly
depends on the site. It also depends on the words that are
placed in the anchor text (the clickable portion of a text
link). From my personal experience, just a few highly relevant
links with strong anchor text can go a long way towards link
popularity for many sites.
About the author:
Andrei co-owns bsleek ( http://www.bsleek.com ) - a site that
specializes in web hosting, design, promotional items, printing,
CD Presentations and more. Andrei is on the Board of Consultants
for Daterade.com and has amassed an extensive technical
knowledge and experience through his career as the CIO for a
major travel management company and through his past careers in
military research, data acquisition and aerospace engineering.
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