10 September 2007
10 PageRank Increasing Myths
I’m sure you’ve all read several “build PageRank quick” guides in the past, however, all is not as it seems.
Why share the secrets if they work for you? Disinformation abound. I try to debunk many of the common myths of pagerank and site building. Take a look.
1. PageRank == better SERP ranking/Traffic
It is important to first realize that PageRank is not site rank. If your homepage ranks PR7 and the rest of your pages rank poorly, it doesn’t matter how good the content is on them. You can completely screw up your page wide PR if your main page with all your valuable google juice ™ links off to 100 other pages and doesn’t let the juice flow naturally to your own pages. Passed on pagerank decreases with each additional link, as it divides up the PR.
I agree that pagerank is great for convincing advertisers to link on your pages, but it is arguable how much of an influence it will actually have on ranking in SERPs and subsequently traffic. It always comes down to content first. I’ve seen PR1 pages rank above PR5 pages for keywords, so it’s not instant “oh I will rank well for this” on anything. The more natural and keyword focused your promotion and content, the better.
There is also a notion of TrustRank, and many other statistics that google uses to determine SERPs. PR really doesn’t mean a whole heck of a lot. It is kind of a side effect to sites becoming popular.
2. You should create 100 domains, and make them into one mega-domain
Many methods work on a “pyramid” of sorts. You build up a lot of low ranking sites then combine them into one big crazy mega-site. There are a couple problems with this, and some truth to it. The first problem is cost. Assuming all .com TLDs, you are looking at 8.95/yr (godaddy) per crap domain name you create (and yes you need to keep those domains as long as you run this method, once the backlinks stop, the rank stops). I personally do not see a real need for this. A cheaper method than registering X crap domains would be to use subdomains. Supposedly google considers each subdomain a separate domain/entity, so you would really only need to spam yourself 1 domain with separate subdomains. Of course, this makes it more identifiable as spam to pages you post to, but you are spreading the wealth enough (hopefully) anyway, that it wouldn’t matter. Or, it is also likely that even subdomains are not necessary and you can merely create X pages and promote each deep link individually and it would have the same effect. Again, it’s called pagerank, not siterank for a reason.
3. Post all links to Social Networking Sites because it builds huge backlink value
Listing your pages on social bookmarking sites (digg, reddit, netscape, newsvine, whatever) gets you a *temporary* PRX backlink. After a couple weeks, days, or hours, you will be off the front page and likely on page 40, which has PR of about 0, and google indexes these sites often, so your page rank will reflect changes. Also the page has a high pagerank, but links off to 30 or so other links, so the effect on your site is going to be so minimal you are probably better off doing something else.
However it is important to note the joy of linkbaiting, which means writing articles so provocative or informative that other bloggers will see it, and feel the desire to write about it in their own blog. Getting a page on the front page of Digg usually has this effect. So, not only do you get a link on the PR8 homepage for a little bit, but also usually 5 to several hundred bloggers will blog about the news themselves and almost always give you a backlink. And this backlink will be both relevant and valuable. Maybe not all the bloggers have huge blogs, but you do get natural and keyword relevant backlinks for nothing. I won’t go into how you would actually get an entry to the front page of Digg, as it’s either really easy or impossibly hard depending on the content (and how much you consider Digg “gamed” at the moment).
4. Posting comments/trackbacks on blogs is bound to help
Getting your comments on the biggest blogs will usually do nothing for your google rank as most, if not all of them use nofollow to stop people from commenting just to get a link, so this method holds no help for google pagerank. Google really does not follow no follows, so they completely ignore your comment link. That being said, it can be very useful to comment on dofollow blogs, as they do pass on google love to you. Just make sure you actually read the post and post a relevant comment. If not, people will just delete your comments, and you did all that work for nothing. I am not going to endorse trackback solutions, as they all seem to target nofollow blogs anyway, but there are methods to build these types of links quickly, but you are much more likely to be banned at a larger level (there are plugins to wordpress to tap into a global commenting system which checks for spam. Posting 500 automated trackbacks/comments in 5 minutes is a huge flag for these sites).
5. Step X, get your spammy sites posted on DMOZ
So many of these guides just tell you to post your site(s) to DMOZ and that will magically build rank. DMOZ is not some automated site that will accept any crap you throw at it. It has human editors that check submissions and really look at your site. DMOZ is also notorious for taking ages to get listed, and it really is unlikely that your shady quickly built domains are *ever* going to get by the human filter that is DMOZ. A site with some shady content or a site just starting up with not a huge amount of value on its own is ever going to get listed on DMOZ, unless there’s some category out there with some editor that just doesn’t give a shit. The whole point of DMOZ is to only link to those sites that are actually relevant and well built. Your sites will be neither of those. After you are already big and popular and fully built out, go ahead and submit, but it under no circumstances is a “first step” to building links. By the time you are ready for DMOZ, you really won’t need the backlink anyway.
6. Just wait before completing step X until there is a pagerank update
PageRank is realtime! I see no need for this waiting period at all. Google pagerank (internally) is updated continuously. It is only the toolbar exports that happen every 100 (or 129++ days like currently), so go ahead and build out your supporting domains, or sister sites or whatever and never wait for the quarterly google update because you feel you need to see solid proof that the toolbar says your site is ready.
7. Build up X crappy sites up to PR4 and now link them to one and you will have PR100000
Pagerank is an exponential scale. It requires a lot more google juice to increase your ranking from 5 to 6 than it does from 2 to 3. Just to take a sample set of natural data, let’s simplify and assume that averaging all links = constant pagerank. A pagerank 4 site can only have 4 backlinks. Many of them take up to 500 backlinks, at that low level; it all depends on the quality of the links. As you move up the chain, you will see that the number of backlinks a PRX site has goes up. For example, PR6 (this site) has 83,000 backlinks, many of them PR6 and PR5. Most PR8 sites that I sampled had over 1 million backlinks. And Apple.com (PR9) has 3.3 million backlinks, a huge number of them from the most respected sites out there. If you have any delusions that you can build a PR7 site with a handful of really crappy domains, you are sadly mistaken.
You can check out the following blog for someone’s estimate on building links. It is not very accurate, but I’ve seen the same graph reproduced several times, so it is probably as good as you are going to get.
8. Take all your PR2 sites, link them to 6, then link them to 2, then 1, and VIOLA! PR10!
The pyramid method in general doesn’t make any sense to begin with. It is clear that pagerank from a PR4 site never results in a PR4 target site. Some love is lost along the way. Pagerank passed directly on doesn’t pass full weight. You cannot create pagerank from nothing. So, the amount you get from linking 100 PR4s to 1 page is the most you are going to get. Linking to 3 sites then 2 then one isn’t going to raise that amount at all; it is just going to lower it.
9. I just bought a PRX domain on eBay, and damn I got a good deal on it
As mentioned, PageRank according to the toolbar is a dated measurement. There are a multitude of methods to fake it. Not to give too much information on how to fake it, but a 301 redirect passes on all current google love to the new site. Conversely, if you 301 to a ranking site, google will assign an (imaginary) pagerank to the current rank. It doesn’t mean a thing. However, some people feel it necessary to point shitty domains at built up domains, wait for an update, and then post some other content on there. Until there is yet another PR update, that shitty domain will still report the 301 domain’s pagerank. Just to point at an example, http://www.screwdsoft.com/ used to redirect to another domain, now it just has some really crappy PAD file templated site on it. Google Toolbar reports a pagerank of 4, however a quick search in google and yahoo show that it has no backlinks whatsoever (hey, I just gave it one). When the new google pagerank export comes out, it will reflect a proper pagerank of 0, but until then someone is free to sell this domain (or advertise it) as a PR4 domain. You will be left holding a completely worthless domain. It is common practice, and you really should be aware of it if you are trying to buy either expired domains or existing domains. You can find an article describing the online auction domain scam
10. Google is stupid and really obvious methods can be used to overcome it and make the fat cash
Wrong. While google is far from exploitable, it does change its algorithm on a fairly regular basis. I know that right now google is now capable of reading variables from javascript, entering data into forms (usually extrapolated from keywords on the current page), and reading data from Flash9 SWFs. All things currently claimed not possible by many SEO sites. Don’t ever use flash they say. Ok, they are hitting flash URLs, but they probably don’t assign much weight to them.. granted. Don’t ever use AJAX or JS they say. Cripes, JS and AJAX have been around forever, do you really think google isn’t working on a way to better their engine by parsing it? Form based information is non indexable they say, well, they are hitting it says I, though I cannot guarantee they actually use any of it. I see traffic from a google IP, with a user agent of the robot, and they don’t request any CSS/images, and they do it 4,000 times, I am going to assume it is not some google employee messing with my head.
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