In my previous two articles Four top tips to make money from blogging” and “4 Stat programmes for Bloggers” I discussed various aspects of blogs and covered the basic principles or actually generating an income from blogs, and how to monitor the traffic your blog gets.
In this article, I am going to discuss Google PR (Page rank). Firstly I will explain in my words just what PR is. Okay so “Page Rank” is a registered trade mark of Google, so no other search engines can use this term. This is why I talk about Google page rank, and not just page rank. It is important to understand that it is only applicable to the one particular search engine.
Okay so PR is basically a link analysis system, that creates a weighting to a site. This means the site is given a value, that is designed to indicate the importance that the site has on the internet for a subject. The actual workings out of PR are unknown, apart from by a few googler’s, and even then they like to keep webmasters guessing by changing things around.
Basically though if sites link back to your site, search engines consider it to mean that site is saying your site has something good/important to say. And if sites with high PR link back to your site it is even better. Google does PR runs throughout the year, and changes the PR of sites dependent on a number of factors including those all important links.
Okay hopefully now you understand the very basic’s of PR, what it is and how it is worked out in simple terms.
A misconception though is that high pr means higher traffic, however my findings seem to indicate that this is not the case. I have seen sites with no PR get a lot more traffic than a site that has a PR 2 or 3 for example.
So if this is the case what is PR really useful for? Well let me tell you it helps when you want to make money from your site, either through selling advertising on the site or the site itself. If your site has a high PR value, then the commercial value of the site/blog will increase over a site without any. As it is meant to indicate it’s importance to the internet and to the search engines in general.
So if you want lot’s of traffic then you need to focus on the content of the site, keeping it updated and unique will generate search engines to visit your site often and hopefully send you traffic. If your looking to sell advertising space on the site, or to sell the site on in future, then you need to work on building up the PR, by getting links.
A sensible option of course would be to work on both, keep the site updated and unique and go around the internet building links at the same time. Doing this should ensure your traffic and your page rank increases.