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Every SEO professional must understand the concept of Google PageRank (or, Google PR). Google PageRank is a mathematical technique(based upon a formula) used by Google for determining the relevance or importance of any webpage. The system was developed by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University in 1988. Google PageRank is the single most important factor that effects your search engine rankings in Google (apart from over 100 other factors that Google considers). It is therefore essential to try to increase your Google PageRank as far as possible.

Google PageRank (also called Google PR and a trademark owned by Google) is a Google technology that rates the significance of a webpage on the WWW and is basically a numeric value from 1 to 10 that measures how important a webpage is. A webpage with a Google PR of 2 is more important than a webpage with a Google PR of just 1.

The foundation of the Google PR system of ranking webpages is based upon the principle of voting. When a website links to another website, it passes a vote in favor of the website. As more and more websites link to the other website, the vote keeps increasing, and the Google PR also goes up. Another important factor is – who is linking? Is an important page linking or just a fresh page that has not been indexed? The vote for an important page is more than the vote for a unimportant page. There fore, Google calculates a page’s importance on the basis of the number of votes cast for the Page and who is casting them.

The out-bound links also have a bearing on the Google PageRank. Every webpage has some out-bound links whether they are going off to other sites or to other pages of the same website. The out bound links lead to a decrease in the ability of a page to pass Google PR. Therefore, the more the out-bound links, the less is the amount of Google PR passed by the page. It is quite possible that a link from a Google PR 6 page passes less Google PR than a PR 4 page if the PR6 page has far more out-bound links than the PR4 page. If a webpage has 8 out-bound links, it will only pass one eighth of its available PageRank. If a page has only one out-bound link, it will pass 100% of its available PageRank.

To summarize, Google PR is based on:

The quantity of in-bound links to a page
The quality of in-bound links to a page (what is the Google PR of the pages on which the links reside)
The Google PR only flows from the sender to the receiver. It is not possible to loose Google PR by linking to a low PR site
The ability to pass PR also depends on the number of out-bound links on the page
The relevance of the content of the page to the subject matter

The Google PR is determined for every page of the website. It may be different for the homepage, and different for the inner pages depending upon the above factors. This is a very simplified explanation of Google PageRank. There are over 100 other factors that determine the PageRank but none are as important as PR.

To check the Google PR of any webpage download the Google Toolbar from http://toolbar.google.com/

The green bar in the toolbar indicates the value of the PR from 1 to 10. If you are searching for the Google PR of a new site, you may have to wait as it takes up to 3 months to get a PR after being indexed.

Below is a screen shot of the Google Toolbar. The green bar shows the PageRank as 10.

Google Toolbar

On the basis of what we have discussed above (which is in no way an exhaustive explanation of Google PR). We can take up a small and simplified scenario to understand Google PageRank.

If you have 2 options for getting inbound links to your site, one is a PR7 page with 3 out-bound links and the other a PR5 page with 2 out bound links, which would you choose? The answer should be the PR 5 page as it will pass 5/2 = 2.5 PR while the PR7 page will pass 7/3=2.3 PR. This scenario has been depicted in the below diagram.

The PageRank of webpage 3 is 4.8 and can be calculated by adding the total PR flowing to it from webpage 1 and webpage 2, which is:

PR of webpage 3 = (PR of webpage 1)/2 + (PR of webpage 2)/3 = 2.5 + 2.3 = 4.8

You can use the following rule of thumb to rate webpages based on their Google PR:

0 – Black listed or new websites or webpages

1 – Very low PR (not much use getting linked from such pages)

2 – Low PR (not much use getting linked from such pages)

3 – Low-average PR (not a very good linking opportunity, but still go ahead with a links exchange)

4 – Average PR (most running sites fall in this category – exchange links)

5 – Good PR (This could be a good links exchange)

6 – Very good PR (Exchanging links with this site would be like finding a rare gem)

7 and above – An excellent opportunity to get linked. Almost never comes for free.

While referring to the above rule of thumb, please keep in mind that you should not leave an opportunity to get linked from a low PR website if you think it could improve in PR or have good future prospects.

How do you create a Robots.txt file?

selfsmo — Tue, 29 Sep 2009 11:07:31 +0000

A Robots.txt file can be created in a simple text editor such as notepad. An example of a Robots.txt file is shown below:

User-agent:Name of the robot comes here for eg. Googlebot

Disallow:The name of the file or directory comes here (This instruction disallows the files/directory from being indexed). Here are some examples:

Below is an example of a Robots.txt file that disallows all webpages from being indexed:

User-agent:*

Disallow:/

Below is an example of a Robots.txt file that allows all webpages to be indexed :

User-agent:*

Disallow:

Below is an example of a Robots.txt file that disallows the Altavista Robot called “scooter” accessing the Admin directory and personal directory:

User-agent:scooter

Disallow:/admin/

Disallow:/personal/

Below is an example of a Robots.txt file that instructs bots not to crawl any file ending in .PDF

User-agent:*

Disallow:/*.pdf

The Robots.txt file can also have multiple sets of instructions for more than one bot. Each set of instructions should be seperated by a blank line. There is only one Robots.txt file for a website.

Below is an example of a Robots.txt file that disallows Google from crawling any of the dynamically generated pages and allows the altavista scooter bot to access every page.

User-agent:Googlebot

Disallow:/*?

User-agent:Scooter

Disallow:

What are Directories and how do they differ from Search Engines?

selfsmo — Sat, 08 Aug 2009 09:45:36 +0000

Directories are sorted listings of websites that are maintained and approved for listing by human editors. Directory databases comprise of websites that have been manually submitted by the website owners or website editors, unlike search engines which make use of automation through spiders and bots for searching new websites, directories make use of human intelligence to ensure that each new site submitted to the directory meets certain standards and is placed in the appropriate category within the directory. Some of the important directories from the point of view of the search engine optimization are:

A good site for locating directories is www.addurl.nu which lists several directories. Since most directories offer free listings, it is always a good idea to get listed in as many as possible since it is viewed favorably by most major search engines while ranking the site in the search results.

Good practices for description meta tags

selfsmo — Fri, 12 Jun 2009 10:20:28 +0000

• Accurately summarize the page’s content – Write a description that would both inform and

interest users if they saw your description meta tag as a snippet in a search result.

Avoid:

• writing a description meta tag that has no relation to the content on the page

• using generic descriptions like “This is a webpage” or “Page about baseball

cards”

• filling the description with only keywords

• copy and pasting the entire content of the document into the description meta

tag

• Use unique descriptions for each page – Having a different description meta tag for each

page helps both users and Google, especially in searches where users may bring up

multiple pages on your domain (e.g. searches using the site: operator). If your site has

thousands or even millions of pages, hand-crafting description meta tags probably isn’t

feasible. In this case, you could automatically generate description meta tags based on

each page’s content.

Avoid:

• using a single description meta tag across all of your site’s pages or a large

group of pages

• Accurately summarize the page’s content - Write a description that would both inform and interest users if they saw your description meta tag as a snippet in a search result.

Avoid:

Writing a description meta tag that has no relation to the content on the page
Using generic descriptions like “This is a webpage” or “Page about baseball cards”
Filling the description with only keywords
Copy and pasting the entire content of the document into the description metatag

• Use unique descriptions for each page - Having a different description meta tag for each page helps both users and Google, especially in searches where users may bring up multiple pages on your domain (e.g. searches using the site: operator). If your site has thousands or even millions of pages, hand-crafting description meta tags probably isn’t feasible. In this case, you could automatically generate description meta tags based on each page’s content.

Avoid:

Using a single description meta tag across all of your site’s pages or a large group of pages

Good practices for URL structure

selfsmo — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 06:56:48 +0000

• Use words in URLs – URLs with words that are relevant to your site’s content and structure

are friendlier for visitors navigating your site. Visitors remember them better and might be

Life Cycle for a Google Query

selfsmo — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 06:43:30 +0000

The life span of a Google query normally lasts less than half a second, yet involves a number of different steps that must be completed before results can be delivered to a person seeking information.


3. The search results are returned to the user in a fraction of a second.			1. The web server sends the query to the index servers. The content inside the index servers is similar to the index in the back of a book – it tells which pages contain the words that match the query.

	2.The query travels to the doc servers, which actually retrieve the stored documents. Snippets are generated to describe each search result.

How to read search results on Google

selfsmo — Thu, 11 Jun 2009 06:24:42 +0000

The goal is to provide you with results that are clear and easy to read. The diagram below points out four features that are important to understanding the search results page:

The title: The first line of any search result is the title of the webpage.
The snippet: A description of or an excerpt from the webpage.
The URL: The webpage’s address.
Cached link: A link to an earlier version of this page. Click here if the page you wanted isn’t available.

All these features are important in determining whether the page is what you need. The title is what the author of the page designated as the best short description of the page.

The snippet is Google’s algorithmic attempt to extract just the part of the page most relevant to your query. The URL tells you about the site in general. Read More>>

Tools ‹ SEO | SMO | Instant Approval Articles — WordPress

selfsmo — Tue, 14 Apr 2009 07:50:24 +0000

Selfsmo is a blog about SEO and SMO.

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selfsmo — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 09:47:27 +0000

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