![Learn How To Be A Successful Blogger [Blogging With Success]](http://cdn.bloggingwithsuccess.net/wp-content/uploads/2009/10/bwsthesislogo.png)
Bob asked:
I was just wondering what your feeling is about Alexa rank and what is the quickest way I can get a page rank on Google? My Alexa ranking has dropped from 21,000,000 to 3,000,000 in about 2 weeks, but I still have no Google page rank. I have been blogging since July.
Let’s start with Alexa rank first. Alexa rank compares websites according to the traffic they get. The lower the rank, the more traffic a site gets. For example, Google is ranked second in Alexa ranking, which means it may be the second most visited site on the internet. I am using “may be” and not “is” because Alexa ranking is not very reliable. They measure the traffic with the help of the Alexa toolbar. The data collected through the toolbar is then processed using an algorithm, total traffic and rank of a website. Personally, I don’t consider it very useful, as it may not give an accurate measure of traffic on a site.
On the other hand, Google’s PageRank is a collection of millions of algorithms (more or less; only Google knows exactly!) that shows how much weight your website is given in Google’s search.
There are two types of PageRanks. The first is a toolbar PageRank, which you see on Google’s Toolbar or other PageRank checking tools. The second is the real PageRank that determines your position in search results.
Toolbar PageRank is (usually) updated once every three months. Your real PageRank may fluctuate, but the toolbar PageRank remains the same until the next update. I think the last update was in June. (I am not sure of this; let me know if you noticed an update in between.) The next one is expected in mid-October. Maybe you will get a PageRank in that update.
How to Increase PageRank
Here are 5 ways to increase PageRank:
- Get Links. Link building is the most effective way to increase PageRank. Try writing Guest Posts on popular blogs in your niche. Commenting on do follow blogs can also help you, but Guest Posting is the best method!
- Watch Your Links. Do not link to any suspicious sites. Also, do not place too many outbound links on a page. Clean all the useless links from sidebars. Make sure to check the code of the theme you are using. Many free WordPress themes have “hidden” links to “sponsors” that may be harmful to your rankings.
- Use Nofollow. When you link to a page, some amount of your rank contributes to the ranking of the target page. This is known as PR passing. If you link to a site you do not trust or a site you do not want to pass PageRank to, use the nofollow attribute. A good example are links to social bookmarking sites. You can make them nofollow. To make a link nofollow, go to HTML editing mode and add rel = “nofollow” in a tag. For example, to make a link to Blogging With Success nofollow, you can use <a rel = “nofollow” href = “http://bloggingwithsuccess.net/”>
- Follow Guidelines. Read Google’s webmaster guidelines, and strictly follow them. In short, do not use unethical black hat methods for SEO. Do not sell links, and avoid duplicate content. You should moderate your comments strictly, as duplicate comments (e.g. spammers leaving the same “Thank You” comments on all blogs) may count as duplicate content. Also, check to see if the commentator has linked to a suspicious site. Last week, I got a quality comment on one of my posts, linking to a website with objectionable content. You should delete or unlink such comments.
- On-Page Optimization. Optimize your pages and posts for keywords. Use Google’s external keyword tool to find low competition keywords, and focus on them. However, make sure you do not overdo it! Use a good SEO plugin like HeadSpace for WordPress. Also, submit your blog to Google webmaster tools to find any indexing problems.
The Quickest Way to Get PageRank
Guest Posting! Write some high quality articles, and submit them to popular blogs in your niche. This will help you get PageRank quickly.
Questions from Readers
I have been thinking about starting a regular Reader Questions series where I answer your blogging related questions. What do you think about the idea? Also, if you have any questions, feel free to contact us.
![About Writer [Blogging With Success]](http://cdn.bloggingwithsuccess.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/User.png "About Author")
About Author
![Related Posts [Blogging With Success]](http://cdn.bloggingwithsuccess.net/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Document.png "Related Posts")
Related posts
{ 26 comments… read them below or add one }
Good information about page rank. I didn’t know page rank took so long to update. I definitely think guest posting is one of the best ways to build PR since you’re usually posting from a higher PR site.
I’m not so sure about the nofollow thing anymore. I’ve heard that Google might have changed their formula such that all outbound links split your PR “juice” and adding nofollow just keeps the other sites from getting your PR juice (so basically you waste your PR juice when you use nofollow). I’m not totally sure if that’s true.
I never really thought about the comments being duplicate content. Good tips of something to keep an eye on.
Thanks for the comment.
I just forgot about Google’s change to Nofollow. Well, it’s right that nofollow links now affect PR flow but on the other side, linking to a suspicious site may hurt you. There are rumors about this but nothing is confirmed about this. So, it is still best to use nofollow links to such sites!
Yeah, I’ve heard a lot of SEO practitioners now saying the Google’s change of heart about No Follow. My comment section is still no follow as I’m afraid I’d be swamped with spammers once I make it Do Follow. The solution of course is too keep comments under moderation to prevent spamming, but this will take too much of a blog author’s time.
I don’t know. I’d think hard about this matter and perhaps read more on it to be sure.
Great advice on guest posting as a way to earn backlinks from high PR blogs.
Thanks for Comment.
Right now, our comment section is also nofollow and I am sure it will remain as such. Dofollow blogs can be spammed a lot and with spammers getting intelligent(they leave real comments sometimes, but link to “objectionable” sites), it may hurt a lot.
Just last week, I got a big comment related to post. When I followed it back, tada, it was a porn site!
Moderating comments will take lot of time.Why not try a plugin? Although plugins are not 100% right but they have great accuracy rate. Defensio has 98.50% success rate for us. You may want to try it out!
Hi,
I am the “Bob” referred to in the post. I really appreciate your responses and will try to follow your advice. I really haven’t focused much on SEO. Been too busy creating content. The information on PageRank is very helpful. Maybe I will be ranked the next time it is computed in mid-October.
Best,
Bob Bessette
Best of Luck for next update.
I don’t put much stock in Alexa rankings either. My blogs ranking ranking is rising steadily yet there’s been no significant increase in traffic or page rank.
No doubt there’s other factors to consider but I see no real correlation between my blog’s performance and it’s Alexa ranking.
Alexa rank is very inaccurate. As I said, no algorithm can predict real traffic of a website from that small sample!
I used to worry about my sites’ rankings, now I don’t really care. Quality content and good relationships will increase traffic to your site, and the rankings will follow. I check every once in a while just to make sure I’m not heading in the wrong direction, but I don’t lose sleep over it, though.
That may be the right attitude. I agree with you that rankings automatically follow with traffic and quality.
Hi,
I adopt Jenkins’ point of view, because I believe it to be the best option in the long term.
Have a nice time,
José
I am so sick of having my self-worth connected to my Alexa rating with an umbilical cord. My Alexa rating fluctuates so much and there’s no rhyme or reason to it – I held a giveaway and had thousands of hits on my site and hundreds of comments and my Alexa rating went up – WTH? Now it’s gone down nearly 120,000 in the last two weeks but tomorrow, it will probably go up – I mean, who knows?
I would like my page rank to go up – I’ve been at page rank 3 forever now.
I wish I could magically turn into a SEO guru and understand all the no-follow/do follow stuff and make my blog google friendly.
As I do not monetize my blogs I take all Alexa rankings with a grain of salt and frankly I don’t swell on PageRank either. When it comes to achieving a higher PageRank we need to be mindful of the changes Google has made and that Technoati has followed re: assigning authority. Google and Technoarti are now focused on natural linking patterns. The lengthy blogroll and unrelated link exchanges have gone the way of the dodo.
Re: Alexa – You may find that quantcast information is more reliable.
Without doubt Google has made it clear that they are looking for natural linking patterns. Another thing that has become clear as well is the Google sandbox phenomena. The Google sandbox debate arises when Google does not assign PageRank to a new website until after six (6) months. This is presumably to serve the purpose of giving new websites time to develop or disappear altogether. The sandbox has become a normal everyday reality for ranking on Google, and most SEO’s now accept that. The result is that to rank on Google for any kind of competitive keyword, you need to be able to leverage some degree of “trust”. What expedites PageRank is building trust via the methods you have shared in your post.
In fact, as Michael Gray astutely put it – “The sandbox isn’t something you are trying to get out of, it’s the trustbox that you are trying to figure a way into.” — From an educational post for those seeking to determine if their blogs have been Google “sandboxed”. Google “sandboxed”.
I’d like to share some additional tips. Make it part of your blog strategy to focus your attention on the following:
* publishing high quality unique content frequently;
* creating clean code and ensuring your site validates;
* tagging properly so the content can be found and indexed;
* linking to exceptional content on authoritative sites with PageRank;
* being careful not to link too link to frequently to sites with lower PageRank.
You have listed some good points here.
However, I am a bit skeptical about #5. Can it really hurt if you link to lower ranked sites? If that is true, than many popular blogs with lot of Guest posts would have lost rank.
Wait! I remember that ProBlogger has lost 1 PR point in last update(7 to 6) after a lot of Guest Posts in that quarter but Daily Blog Tips did not lose anything (stayed at 6) even with more Guest Posts! Strange!
Heya! Yeah, to be frank, I didn’t know anything about the difference from the real PR and toolbar’s PR. Perhaps I should be able to see some changes to the new pagerank results for my blog in late Oct as you’ve mentioned?
Best of Luck for next update. Hopefully, you will get good PR.
Man,, this kinda’ new for me
i just know that comment like : Thank you, Great post is considered to be duplicate content by Google
Ouch what a bad move i make to approve all those comments
but is that true that Google consider it as a duplicate content?
Maybe and may not be.
Nothing can be said definitely about Google. They can sometimes behave silly. Just like Curios Little Person pointed out below, Google may consider same content on a blog duplicate but not on different sites!
If there’s one thing I do, it’s follow every link left in the comment section of my blogs. Because I use the “CommentLuv” plugin, the last thing I need is to pass link juice on to some spammy “Lose 10lbs in 10 seconds” website which more often than not links to some adult website.
That is a good practice. However, make sure that you have good Anti Spyware and Anti-Virus installed. Many times, sites may be suspicious!
I’ve read your whole post and everything looks great. The only question that pop’s up in my mind is …. what is duplicate content.
According to me duplicate content is a post repeating twice on a blog, i back this up by saying that. i know of users who distribute the same article to many article directories to acquire backlinks and google does not penalize them?
Duplicate content must be hyped at the early stage by a few webmasters or people who wanted to sell their Article rewriter softwares
Just my one cent
Cheers
Sandeep
It may be the Trust factor in play there. Many article directories are highly trusted by Google(but strangely, are easily outranked by even PR 0 sites for same content!)
However, Google is Google. They really act mysteriously!
I will use no foollow for externals from now.
I don’t trust Alexa one bit. Their stats are not very reliable as their stats are based on data collected from people who have installed the alexa toolbar and these people form a very small fraction of internet users. A good way to improve your alexa rank is to install the alexa toolbar yourself. Then whenever you visit your site, your site will get a new hit.(I read this somewhere but I have not tested it yet.)
I have no info that discredits Alexa, so I can’t offer an opinion. But some folks put lots of stock in Alexa. I tend to look more at Page rank and any Alexa below 100,000. Thanks for visiting and let me know when your WP blog (regular tips) is ready.
{ 8 trackbacks }