Un-learn what you thought you knew about PageRank. Learn PageRank the right way and put it to work for you for a change!
It's a "pure content" day today. This marketing jewel of wisdom comes to us from StomperNet faculty Leslie Rohde, from his article "Precision Guided PageRank" in Volume 1, Issue 2 of "The Net Effect" monthly action journal.
In those pages, Leslie gives the best and easiest-to-follow explanation I've ever seen for what PageRank actually IS. But that's not what I'm here today to share with you...
No, today, I'm going to tell you the 4 Rules for Making More Money with PageRank, and the beauty is, you don't even have to know your own PageRank score.
Because no matter what, it's going to improve if you follow our rules. You can forget worrying about that little green PageRank bar in your toolbar ever again - it's time to focus on what really matters.
Rule #1: Make More Pages.
As Leslie explains in his original article, links do not create PageRank (no matter what you may have heard otherwise). The only thing that creates and holds PageRank is a web page.
See, there's only a finite amount of PageRank available to share among all the pages in Google's search index. Think of Google's index as a tasty pie. (I like apple, but you can think of your own flavor...) :)
Every single new page that gets added to the index is like cutting the pie into one more slice. Now with billions of webpages, we're talking about some really tiny pieces of pie - but all the slices of the pie still only equal one pie when you add them up.
This is important, because more pages in the index means a bigger chunk of that PageRank Pie is yours to control and profit from.
Here's another way to look at it. Even if you don't know how many total lottery tickets have been sold for a particular drawing, you still know that every lottery ticket you buy improves your chance of winning.
Web pages are the same way. The more you have, the more PageRank you possess. But that doesn't do you any good unless you have enough PageRank to matter.
But how much is enough? How much PageRank do you need? How many pages do you need to make?
Rule #2: Your competition dictates how much PageRank you need.
That was easy. :) Research your competition - see how many pages they have in the search indexes by using "site:" searches for their domains on both Google and Yahoo.
Going to Yahoo may seem strange since we're trying to rank better on Google, but Google's page-count numbers are known to show as much lower than what the true number of pages Google has indexed.
Yahoo shows a much higher (and more accurate) estimation for the number of pages it has indexed from a particular site. You can use that to "guesstimate" how many Google has, because chances are, if Yahoo has indexed a page, Google has as well.
Once you know how many pages your competition has, you have a target to aim for. It's time to get to work, and the goal is: more. Generally speaking, you want to try for more pages than any of your competitors.
But only as many more as you need to beat them - there's no special prize for winning by a mile. 1st place is the best you can do, so aim just above whoever is there now so you don't overwork yourself for no return.
Advice: Put some effort into these pages - there's no point in putting trash pages into the index just to have "more" - you want the content on these pages to be WORTH linking to, and WORTH finding in the search engines.
Every page you have is a potential entry point for a possible future customer. Keep that in mind, and you should do fine.
Rule #3: Improve links between your pages.
Warning: This is not about getting external one-way links to your pages. That's great and all, and will improve your PageRank, but we want to focus on pages you actually control: your own.
So we know that every page in Google has a little bit of PageRank assigned to it just by existing. But the real magic of Google is that any page's PageRank score can be manipulated using links.
To use that "pie" example again, incoming links will make a page's "slice" of the pie bigger, but any outgoing links will make the "slice" smaller.
(Ok, the way it really works is a bit more complicated than slices of pie, but the metaphor will make you money, even if it won't get you a PhD.)
The bigger a slice is, the better it will rank in the index, and the more links coming into any given page, the bigger that page's slice of the PageRank pie will become.
That's why we wanted to make so many pages in Rule #1.
Once we have all these slices in the big pie, we can actually manipulate the size of each slice by controlling how we link between them.
Here's the right way to do it:
Internally, we make sure that all our least important pages always link to our most important, money-making pages. But also make sure that your most important pages never link to your least important pages.
In this way we "sacrifice" the PageRank on unimportant pages only to boost the PageRank where it matters. Once we "fatten up" a page with all that sacrificed PageRank, we want to keep it there.
By now, some of you may be thinking that building a website with all these crazy link structures and limitations might be hard. After all, how is a customer supposed to find your stuff if you link to some stuff and not others?
For example, some non-money pages should obviously still be linked to, but really shouldn't get any of your precious PageRank. Pages like "Privacy Policy" and "Terms of Service" come to mind.
Obviously, you want every single page on your site to link to those for customer usability. But how can you do that without also "leaking" precious PageRank juice?
Fortunately, this is really easy. You simply use the rel="nofollow" method in the "a" tag on any link that you don't want passing PageRank.
Ex. http://stompernet.com" rel="nofollow">Click Here
That HTML would allow both human visitors and search spiders to follow it to StomperNet.com, however none of the PageRank from the linking page would be passed on to the linked page.
If you do nothing else from this report, do this:
Go through every page on your site and "nofollow" any link that doesn't point to a page that can make you money.
Check your menus, your footers, your headers, and you can even nofollow all external links that would make a visitor leave your site.
Rule #4: Balance your time and effort between 1 and 3.
While this rule doesn't require any actual "work" from you, it will certainly help you keep your sanity (and keep more hair in your scalp).
As Leslie pointed out in the original article, you don't need to worry too much about your internal linking if your website only has 12 pages. You just don't have enough "juice" to make too much difference.
However, if your site has 2000 pages indexed and you haven't ever taken a look at your links for nofollow opportunities, you're WAY past due.
Look to your competitors to see if you need to start building pages. Once you've closed the gap, then you can worry about optimizing your links to tweak your PageRanks and funnel it to your best pages.
Remember, we want to work wisely here. Running an online business can be a lot of work already, so there's REALLY no sense in wasting effort on something that won't return maximum benefit, right?
And that's why we're here. :)
StomperNet is not just out to tell you about the next big over-hyped money-getting thing - we're here to share time-tested, proven methods that we've gathered in REAL marketplaces with REAL businesses. Most importantly, we're about getting real results.
We've hired all the geniuses and scientists and engineers to understand all this stuff and work on the math and technical bits. You can just sit back and be the business owner who can actually focus on their own business.
And that's when you start making real money, so let's go there together.
Stick with StomperNet, because I'll have several more "Jewels of Wisdom" from our Faculty's favorite articles, right from the pages of "The Net Effect" - our monthly action journal for online businesses.
Just keep your eyes peeled, and look for our next report coming very, very soon!
Until Next Time,
Keep Stomping
~Andy Jenkins and the
StomperNet Faculty and Staff
P.S. The report above is just a small part of a much longer article by StomperNet Faculty Leslie Rohde. If you want a more complete understanding of PageRank and exactly how it works within your site, who better to learn from than one of the first guys who ever reverse engineered Google's search engine.
That article, "Precision Guided PageRank" is from Volume 1, Issue 2 of "The Net Effect" and if you want to pick up this back issue now and get INSTANT ACCESS to the digital version, or even just see what other articles we packed into that issue by visiting www.TRCB.me/snblog:
Andy Jenkins is CEO of Stompernet. This article first appeared on the StomperNet blog. Reprinted with permission of StomperNet LLC.
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