It is no secret that in order to get your website ranked highly in the results pages of search engines like Google, you need to have links pointing at your site, and lots of them. But some links are worth more than others. You can be ranked above a site that has 20,000 links with 3000 if yours are of a better quality.

There are many factors to take into account when trying to work out how much a link will be worth, but it can pretty much be summed up by the Page Rank that Google has given the page that you want a link from.

Basically, Google ranks every page it comes across (not straight away, they review it every 6 months or so) from zero to ten. Zero being the lowest, and ten of course being the highest. There are pages that Google doesn’t rank that will have Page Rank (PR) n/a, this will most likely mean that Google has not found that page yet, or it is an insignificant page deep within a site, or it could mean that Google doesn’t like that site and could have blacklisted it. You will very rarely see a PR 10 site (apart from google.com) as there are only about 8 in the world.

So what benefits does a high PR present? Well, if you can get a link from a PR 6, 7 or even 8 site, then that will have a much bigger effect of your sites results ranking than a link from a PR 1 or 2 site. PR is basically, how valuable, important, up to date and genuine Google thinks the content of a page is and links basically count as votes to say that a site is worth visiting. So if you’ve got a PR8 site telling Google that your site is worth visiting (i.e. linking to you) then Google will start to favour your site much more.

A common misconception in the SEO world is that Google PR directly helps you get higher in the results rankings. The truth is it doesn’t. It is extremely valuable however because once you start achieving good PR, people will want links from you, and because the link you will be giving them is of high quality, you can request a high quality link back.

When you first start trying to get some PR for your site, you will be faced with what is almost a catch 22 situation in that the main way in which PR is achieved, is by getting quality links. However, people will be unwilling to give you and quality links until you have some PR to give them a quality link back. So to start with, it is rather a long process.

A good method to start off with is to find some sites that are in the same position as yourself (with related themes to yours if possible, but I wouldn’t worry too much about that) i.e. they are looking to build some PR by getting lots of links, and exchange links with these sites. Then (provided these sites have kept their efforts up) in 6 months to a years time, these sites will have some PR, and will still be linking to you, therefore you will have some PR by then, making these initial link exchanges mutually beneficial.

There are other things that are taken into account when Google calculates your PR. Obviously nobody knows all of them except the people who develop the system, otherwise everyone would manipulate it to give them good PR, but what we do know is that sites that are regularly updated with fresh new content hold far more sway with Google and other search engines than sites that are left for long periods of time.

The reasoning behind this is that if a site has fresh new content every week or every fortnight or so, then the information will be the most up to date and relevant to modern times as opposed to a site that has had the same content on it for a year. Google wants to give people the best, most up to date information related to what they are looking for. If you bear this in mind when starting a PR campaign, along with the correct linking methods, you cant go far wrong.

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