Increasing PageRank

Each page of your website has a PR value, and so does your website as a whole. Depending on how you structure your internal links will dictate to some extent what the PR value of a page will be, as will external links pointing to a page on your site. Although page PR value is important, you should really be trying to increase your overall site PR value.



There are only two ways to increase your site’s overall PageRank:

1. Get more incoming links that point to your site.

2. Add new pages to your site (which was discussed in a previous chapter).



The PR value of each page indexed by Google on the Web is in constant flux. New pages are added, old pages are removed, more links are added – all of which over time decrease the “value” of your incoming links.

As the number of websites (and web pages) in Google’s index increases, so does the total PageRank value of the entire Web, and so also does the high end of the overall scale used. This is kind of like the top student setting the “curve” for an exam at college. The top student gets 100% and everyone else gets correspondingly less. Therefore, the top-ranking site (or handful of sites in actuality) gets the maximum, perfect PageRank score (which is a 10 in the Google Toolbar) and everyone else is scaled down accordingly. As a result, some web pages may drop in PageRank value for no apparent reason. If a page's actual PR value was just above a division on the PR scale, the addition of new pages to the Web may cause the dividing line to move up the scale slightly and the page would end up just below the new division.


What this means is that you should always strive to get more links that point to your site, otherwise your site will naturally start slipping in rankings due to the “decay” of PageRank value for incoming links – both from other pages on your site as well as from other websites. This is also why you should add new pages to your site on a regular basis, as additional pages will increase your site’s overall PR score too.