Well if you have been working hard recently on your SEO and link popularity, you will have just noticed that Google has just updated it’s page rank for all your websites. (as of 30th Nov 2010).
So when is the next google page rank updates for 2011. We won’t try to second guess or prognosticate the exact dates – Google sometimes change their schedule based on development of algorithm changes, testing etc. It’s a good yard stick to lookout for a google page rank change every 4-5 months.
We are asked a lot about page rank and its importance in SEO. Page rank is firstly an estimate of your sites popularity and is determined by many factors, mainly by the number of hyperlinks to a page externally and internally. We can all get bogged down with complex computations, damping factors, simple PR theory and the rest of it, but for 99% of people this is not necessary.
(1) Google page rank can be beneficial if you have a lot of pages and can aid in ranking your articles for medium to long tail searches. If you were to write the same article on two different websites, one with PR 5 home page and the other PR1 home page, and linked one level down from the home page, the article posted to the PR5 site would out rank the PR1 site.
(2) Page rank can be important if you are choosing what sites to target for links, or someone else benefiting from you linking to their site.
(3) Page rank is not the primary factor when optimising your keywords in the search engines.
(4) How often do you see a site ranked for top 5 for a keyword, but they have a lower page rank than a site below it. Often is the answer! Don’t lose sleep over page rank!
Here are some of the things that you can do to help build and maintain your page rank:
(1) Creat unique contents/articles on a regular basis and improve internal linking to other pages. (inc your home page)
Create at least three pages on your site and link them together: In this example, view page 1 as your home page.
Page 1 to Page 2
Page 2 to Page 3
Page 3 to Page 1
(2) If you are link building and over using anchor text based on your keywords, your page rank will struggle to increase and could go down. Keep links natural and don’t over do it over a short period of time!
(3) Use no follow on un important pages. This will focus PR to your more important inner pages. This does help although I wouldn’t spend too much time on this.
(4) And last but not least, get some good links, themed, natural from related sources.
Be worried if you page rank disappears over night, although this can sometimes happen temporarily for short periods. Be patient and wait. if it doesn’t come back, you have upset Big G!