You may think that PR stands for Public Relations…. but if you’ve got a blog or web site, there’s another type of PR which affects your site more than you may know. It’s called Page Rank (PR for short).
In a nutshell, Page Rank is assigned by Google to determine the “authority” of your web presence. It’s determined by a complex (and closely guarded) formula which measures the “quality” of inbound links to your web presence. Lots of links from sites with little or no “authority” will do little to elevate your Page Rank, while a relatively small number of incoming links from an .edu web site can do wonders at elevating your PR.
Lately, a lot of big time bloggers have been slapped HARD by Google. One of them is John Chow. Despite his increasing revenues his site has dropped from a PR 6 to a PR 3. This is thought to be a result of him “passing Google PR juice” through his paid links. Google HATES it when someone “games” their system and many bloggers who “sell links” either through ads or reviews have taken to blocking paid reviews with robots.txt. (Thanks Andy for that explanation.)
Courtney Tuttle offers a nice tutorial on how to ask Google to reconsider their valuation of your web presence. Courtney also reviews the practices that got John Chow penalized by Google.
The higher your Page Rank, the more “respect” you’ll get from Google. If you’re putting all of your marketing eggs in the Google basket… then you’d better learn all you can about playing by the rules set forth by Google.
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kidkraft 03.05.08 at 4:10 pm
This is the easiest to understand explanation of PR I have read. I do have to confess that sometimes it disturbs me that Google has so much control on what is deemed valuable on the web.
Lingeri 03.07.08 at 2:08 pm
Within the SEO community it is generally beleived that the PR penalty is only for show and doesent really affect any the PageRank effects for the sites hit.
In essence, Google has lowerede the PageRank visible in the Google Toolbar, but many of the sites hit, reports taht search engine traffice hasen’t declined and thus it is beleived to be a ’scare’ tactic of Google…