Does PageRank Matter?

PageRank (PR) is the definition of Google to show how useful, popular and important a website is. It ranges from 0 (the least important) to 10 (the most quality and useful).

To Webmasters:
A high PR is an achievement. It tells the world that your website is useful, popular and of quality. PageRank does affect your Google Search Engine listing too. A website with higher PR drives more traffic than a low PR website.

To Visitors:
Most internet surfers would not know what PageRank is and they probably will not bother about the page's rank. But if they do understand PageRank, then your PR would be an indicator to show how credible your content is.

How is PageRank determined?

PageRank is determined by quality backlinks. A backlink is when another web page links to your page. When a page links to you, that means the page is "voting" for you. The more "votes" for your page, the better your PR will. However, not every "vote" has the same weight. The weight of the "vote" is determined by the PageRank of the page linking to you. This means that a couple of links from pages with high PR is more beneficial than hundreds of links from pages with low PR. But unfortunately, each page can only transfer so much of the PageRank. This would mean that a PR 6 page could actually give out as much weight per "vote" as a PR 3 page if it has too many outgoing links.

Besides backlinks, Google does consider some other factors as well to determine the PageRank. For example, the longer your domain has been registered for, the better your PageRank will be. It would be good to look into these other factors to maximize your potential PageRank.

What you can do to increase your PageRank?

To improve your PageRank, the first thing you need to do is to get more quality backlinks to your website. Here are just some of the ideas on how to obtain quality backlinks:

1. Submit to Web Directories
You need to submit your website to a large amount of web directories with hight PageRank. Directories with low PR are still worth submitting though because their PageRank will eventually increase with time. This will be the best way to improve PageRank and to get traffic at the same time.

2. Link Exchanges
Link exchange is a common practice to improve PageRank, where two websites link to each other. This works best only if you exchange link with websites that have at least the same PR as you and of the similar subject. Link exchange with low PR website doesn't help to improve your PageRank. Links from websites with different subject will not help much, you will find very little if any PR will actually be transferred to you.

3. Forum Signatures
Forum signature is where you sign off whenever your post a topic or comment. Place a link to your website in your forum signature will help improve your PageRank if the forum has a high PR, and it could also help to drive more traffic from forum members seeing your signature. Besides that, your site could also get spidered more often since it's linking to a forum. Forums generally have lots of activities and new contents everyday and this is what search engines love.

4. Buy Advertising
This is where you buy text link ads on websites with high PR. This can be very effective, but it is only a temporary thing. If you buy text links for only a couple of months, when the months are over, you won't have the backlinks to keep your PageRank. So after you have spent so much money on text links, but in the end you are right back where you started. This method is not advisable.

5. Submit Web Articles
Write articles about the subject of your website and submit them to those free article directories. Make sure you have your website address in author resource box. You then allow others to use your articles with the condition that they remain the author resource box that has a link back to your site. If you wrote a quality article, you will find many websites will want to use it, thus giving you plenty of backlinks.

6. Quality Website
Build a quality and useful website that benefits your visitors. When your visitors enjoy reading your website, they will start spreading the words by linking to you.