Scamming Page Rank

It's fairly widely accepted by most SEO's that your page rank may have no bearing whatsoever on your actual position in organic SERPS. In other words, the top 10 results on any SERP will not necessarily be in descending Page Rank order - it's quite easy for a PR3 to beat a PR5 or PR6 site, for example.

However, some SEO's are convinced that their time is best spent trying to get a higher PR (I'm not one of them). So much so, that they are using some fairly sneaky techniques.

Readers of Google's Webmaster Blog will have seen how recently, the Google Bot has been going on a few dates with some amusing results. This light hearted look at some of the best ways to "please" Googlebot and help with Internet crawling, looked at 301 & 302 (307) redirects amongst other topics. For those of you who are not familiar with the codes, they are codes for human users and search bots alike - re-directing the user/search bot to another page, presumably as the existing page doesn't exist anymore. 301 is a permanent redirect, and 302 is temporary.

Certain webmsaters or SEO's are exploiting the idea of the redirect, by using 302's to point their site to a higher PR site. This can all be very confusing, and there are ways to check. For example, in Google, you can type info:yoursite.com and then check the number of links to that site, for example. If it's ranking as a PR5 but has only 200 links, chances are it's a fake.

Another much quicker way is this handy check page rank tool which delivers a real result for domain name (with or without www), in just a few seconds, and is very relaibale.

These, and many other Black Hat techniques should be avoided to acheive sustainable results in the search engine results pages. Training can be given on thse topics by Barcelona SEO company.

Google and Page Rank

So how do I know that I’m ranking well in Google? Or that anything I’m doing with regards SEO is making changes or having a beneficial effect ? Well, there are a few little tools to help you know this. Google has it’s own ranking system which it gives to each website it visits. This is called a Page Rank, or PR, and is marked from 1 – 10. There are very few PR10 sites, and even excellent quality websites, such as bbc.co.uk are only PR8. The majority of sites are PR0 that exist on the internet. An average site should be looking for a PR4.


The best way to check a page's Page Rank is to download the Google Toolbar.
It is difficult to ascertain what Google uses to classify your site and give it it’s PR number. However, there are various things which could contribute. Site age is a benefit (the date your domain name went live) – the older the better, but be aware that often a server migration could affect the PR, as Google will recognise this as a “new site”. The content of your site and the quality of the content is also important. Betting, Gambling, Porn or Adult sites are therefore very difficult for Google to “like”. Where your page links to and who links back to you is an important factor. As a rule, don’t link to any “bad neighbourhoods” (Google’s terminology), and try and link to relevant sites to your own’s content. A site which is constantly updating with rich, quality text is also a benefit and if it receives lots of visitors or “hits” then this is also a very positive influence (see my earlier example of bbc.co.uk).

Another way to see if the changes you are making are having an effect on your ranking is to before you start, check where you rank for the phrases or keywords you are targeting and then compare this on, say, a monthly basis. If you know sufficient to make changes to your own website, you can also install the tracking code from Google Webmaster Tools, which will then give you detailled information about your visitor stats, any problems within your website as a whole, and other intersting statistics. I will delve more into the benfits of webmaster tools at a later date.

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