Stefson*dot*com

A pagerank is a numeric value that represents how important your page is. Google makes it so, when one page links to another, it’s actually casting a vote for the other page. The more links (votes) you get incoming, the more ‘important’ your page is, so the higher a pagerank it gets.
So all votes matter, but are not counted the same. Some are considered to be more important or valuable than others; important quality sites can help make others sites look valuable. If a high ranking page links to you, than that link is considered to be more valuable.

Now it won’t do you any good to go all wild and crazy on linkexchanging and getting as many inbound links as possible, hoping that your pagerank will skyrocket. Because it won’t. Google makes sure that links matter in relation to content. Many people believe Google has a whole arsenal to determine your pagerank. Take for example Google’s pagerank algorithms and hyper text matching analysis tools.

Because of this an entire industry of Search Engine Optimization experts and businesses has been build up around Google’s Pagerank. Whether this is a good thing or not, I’ll leave that up to you, but needless to say, it’s big business. And when big business is involved, some like to play it unfair. So a lot of manipulating and cheating is being done to artificially improve ones pagerank.
Nowadays, you can buy links from wellknow established blogs/sites with high pageranks, get involved in three way linking schemes. Is it all legit? A big greyish zone is what I call it.

On Matt Cutts blog, a Google employee, there have been remarks about the fact that reciprocal linking is done with and won’t do pageranking any good. Mainly because the relevance (content-wise) can’t be proven just because yours and the other site ‘like’ eachother. There are exceptions, but very few.

Now you can ask yourself, is Google pagerank a usefull tool?
Some people live by it, others don’t care. Now you should know, that a pagerank has become to be a prestige and popularity contest for lots of webdesigners/webmasters. Basically it says, in the eyes of Google, how big and important your site is. So for people that live for their pagerank, there is this constant urge to improve and maintain their ranks.

Personally, I have little interest in Google’s Pagerank at the moment for this blog. Sure it’s nice to see the green indicator move towards the right, but you shouldn’t dedicate your life to it.
How would I try to improve my ranking?
First, I definately would not use any of the greyish zones. I would also forget trying to get links from highranking pages. I would target sites that have a decent standing, but are likely to improve. Make sure that the sites in question have good, quality content and are updated often.
The advantage of this is that it’s a whole lots easier (and free!) to get your links on them, plus you might be able to get keywords in the links themselves, which are very important. This way your site can grow along with your linkpartners.

(Note: This blog currently does not have a rank due to only being indexed recently by big G.)