Boosting Your Blog's PageRank

I can always count on Joan Stewart to ask good blogging questions.  Today, I received this from her:

I’m frustrated that my blog has a page ranking of only 3, despite a ton of content. I am sure that’s because I don’t have a lot of inbound links, which seem to be the Number One factor that the search engines consider when it comes to page rank.

I’ve set up Google Alerts for specific keywords, and I spend a lot of time posting comments at relevant blogs that deal with my topic---one way to get more inbound links to the blog.

This morning, I checked my Alexa traffic for my blog and discovered that I only have 60 inbound links to my blog. That can’t be right. In the last 3 months alone, I’ll bet I’ve posted comments at at least 100 blogs. So how come those don’t show up in the Alexa stats?

Any other tips for getting a high page rank or more inbound links?

First, when I checked the page-rank for Joan's blog, I got a 5/10 which is pretty damn good.  So, I'm not sure why she gets a 3 and I get a 5.  That's beyond my knowledge and experience.

Second, it's my understanding that Alexa is not the most reliable for counting inbound links.  When I checked Joan's inbound links on Alexa, it was 60. When I checked on Google (links: www.publicityhound.net), the number is 366. 

Third, based on an earlier question from Joan, we've learned that links in comments on some blog platforms often have "no follow tags" (see the discussion and comments on no follow tags here) which would give Joan no SEO juice.

So, how do you get a higher page-rank?  It's very tough, especially once you get to 4 or 5. Because of the complexity of how page-rank is calculated, I cannot go in to it because it's over my head.  However, it's my understanding that getting a PR6 is much harder to get than a PR5 which is much harder than PR4 and those PR6 and higher pages are rare.

How do you get more inbound links?  Beyond commenting on other people's blogs, other bloggers need to link to your blog in the body of their blog posts; or other sites need to link to your blog.  A link from a higher ranked, relevant site is going to do more for your page rank than a PR2 linking to a PR5.  A link from a PR6 site to a PR5 site is going to give you more juice.

The bottom line is this: write excellent, valuable, useful, informative content.  If people like it, they will link to it.  All this stuff takes time.  I've been blogging for 2 1/2 years and both primary blogs have a PR5.

I'd be most happy and grateful for comments, corrections and clarification on any of the info I've written.

Comments

[space ramblings]

not all page rank checkers are legitimate, many of the SEO sites that advertise page rank checking are frauds and that may account for the different results she got

if you go down the list of google search results for page rank checker and try each one, you're likely to get varied results

[Matt608]

HI, I have been having this trouble as well. My blog is just 1 month old but I have updated it at least once per day and I have over 40 posts (I dont mean this is a lot, but for a month its not bad). It is about SEO, blogging for money and making money generrally online, from my personal experience. http://matt608.blogspot.com

Its true that we would pay too much attention to pagerank than the other factors, but it would be nice to have a heads-up from Google, explaining this so we dont all get so confused and angry about it!

[Nico]

Find out which Blog Directories are linking back to your blogs and which are only trying to increase their own PR (page rank)
http://blog-dir.blogspot.com/

[Conficio]

The Google PageRank is based on a logarithmic formula. meaning the number you see is the power of an unknown base. for illustration purposes think the base is ten, then a PageRank of 3 means 10 to the power of 3 = 1000 inbound links. And PR of 4 means 10,000 links, PR5 = 100,000, etc.

Not that this is the only factor, because every link gets multiplied by a factor and the PageRank of the page it is placed on. But it is a good model to think of.

That explains, why it is harder to get from PR 4 to 5, than it is from PR 3 to 4. Think 9,000 inbound links vs. 90,000.

[Jack]

I thing that the 2 most important factors are : "time" and "good content".

[closets]

My website is only PR 3 but we are consistently on the first page for our primary search terms. PR is only important to who link to you.

[Mitchell Jamel]

Based on what I am reading many believe it is the quantity over the quality.

For me I like the quality side of Links

[Rosie]

Ich wollte mich mal an dieser Stelle bedanken für die vielen wertvollen Tipps die ich hier gelesen habe. Ich bin immer wieder von neuen erstaunt, was es doch so alles gibt.

[Bea]

I just checked my links through Yahoo which Pitfall mentioned and I had five pages on Yahoo versus only two with Google. Thanks for letting us know!

[yasir]

very nice article indeed