Something about Google PageRank

PageRank is something that all money making blogs are concerned with as it directly affects the level of earnings a blog can make online. Seems like datacentres are not responding to Google PageRank enquiries, so that could be a sign that another PageRank update is in the works. The last update was sometime in April if I remember correctly, and since updates are known to be done every quarterly, the time window seems about right. And while I’m on this topic, I might as well do a brief, simplified writeup on it.

What Is Google PageRank?

PageRank is a formula invented by Google to determine how important or influential a web page is by counting the number of incoming links it has. An incoming link is when another website links to your page. It is treated as a vote, so if a page has many votes, it is considered to be more important than another page that has less votes.

Make Money Online with Some Useless.InfoHowever, not every single incoming link is counted because Google is able to tell if your link is a bad link. Bad links include links from, for example a link farm which is basically a web site set up specifically to farm out links with little or no content. This is only one aspect but one of the most important aspects that affects a web page’s PageRank.

To add to the confusion, not every incoming link is equal. A link from a PR7 site, for example carries far more weight than links from say 100 PR1 sites. Folklore in the blogosphere reports of a new site getting a PR4 by getting incoming links from a few PR6 sites. Links which are organically or naturally formed also carry more weight than paid links - something which Google is supposedly able to detect.

There are many, many articles on various aspects of PageRank in particular, how to increase PageRank but ultimately, no one except Google knows exactly how the entire machinery really works. And Google is not telling. Plus, Google is constantly changing the way they rank sites by introducing new rules such as the “nofollow” tag.

Should You Care About PageRank?

If you are using your blog to make money online, or looking to monetize your blog in some way, then PageRank is one of the criteria that potential advertisers will take into account when deciding which web site or blog to place their advertisements. It also affects how high you can command for your advertising fee.

Make Money Online with Some Useless.InfoPaid review sites like PayPerPost allocate posting offers to blogs based on PageRank and Alexa ranking. If your blog has a PageRank of 5 or higher, you are eligible for higher paying offers that can pay USD50.00 or more. Many advertisers look to higher PageRank blogs for paid reviews as it give them a higher rate of return in terms of traffic and backlink. Sites such as Text Link Ads which sell links to advertisers place a higher value on text links on a higher PR blog.

If you sell text links directly to advertisers, a text link on a blog with a PageRank of 6 with a considerable amount of daily traffic can fetch USD$150 per link per month or more.

Don’t Pray To The PageRank God

Many experienced bloggers will tell you not to obsess with your blog’s PageRank but to concentrate instead on producing quality content. The reasoning being that if your articles are interesting and of high quality, people will naturally want to link to them, thus giving you that vote for higher PageRank.

Only after you have got your content production line in order do you market your content in various ways such as submitting them to social bookmarks and so on. I think that there is much truth in that, although producing good content everyday is not something everyone is capable of doing.

In fact, I was searching for information on how to keep yourself motivated to write a quality post daily and to see what tools there may be which can help make the task a little easier. I will post my findings soon.