All this time I've been trying to improve my sites' ranking on the search engines by improving content and keywords. I've brought traffic to my sites by putting in links from online communities. Apparently I've missed the point completely.
The point is PageRank & I can't believe I never noticed it before. I stumbled across it today while reviewing "PayPerPost". "PayPerPost" pay for product placements and advertorial on blogs. Quality blogs. This blog isn't good enough. I don't post often enough.
One of the advertisers stipulated only sites with a PageRank of at least 2. "What's PageRank"? The question flashed through my head a microsecond before I typed PageRank into Google. I now know that PageRank is actually a Google trademark, based on the number and quality of links to a page from other webpages. Scrolling down the list of explanations, I chanced on Webworkshop which explained that search engines avoid abuse of the PageRank system by assigning a PageRank of 0/10 to any sites which have too many links - known as link farms. Links to penalised sites can penalise your PageRank.
Didn't I just link to one of those last week? And didn't people stop coming to my sites afterwards? It was one little link which did that? I went to the first PageRank checker I could find and checked the link farm. It has a PageRank of 0. Not much point getting links from there, its not going to increase my ranking. In fact I'm better off linking from here.
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Michelle - you've missed out one factor completely. and that's the Google
Crawler. The Google Crawler traverses through as many sites as it can - but
it misses plenty (there are millions of blogs out there, after all). Also, it
goes through one website not more than once in 4 months. i think you're
referring to my blog in your post here. i got the idea of link exchange only
around 2 months back. thus not only does google probably not know that i have
several sites linking to me, but it also probably not know that i have a link
exchange program running. if you search on google with
link:http://jokingblog.blogspot.com/ it gives 24 search results. Link farms
are those which have 100's of links incoming and outgoing to them.
i'll give you the best example - the Bestest Blog of All Time.
For months it had a PR OF 0. Last month, the PR jumped to 5. So you shouldn't
stop linking due to the worry of link farms - as my blog (i'm pretty sure),
isn't classified as a link farm.
Furthermore - the webworkshop talks about websites. We are talking about
blogs. It is very, very, very difficult to get a good pagerank for blogs
unless you have tons of traffic and tons of good content.
Another point - link exchange between relevant sites increases page
rank. The JOKES Blog is releant to the Jokes Warehouse and Jokes Vault. This
is mentioned in Google Webmaster Guidelines as well - so you have proof for
yourself!
It's up to you to decide now :)
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