Google Page Rank is an important principle that all website owners should be aware of. Created by Google’s Larry Page whilst at Stanford University, Page Rank is a system that measures the importance of a web page.

Links are like votes

Page Rank assumes that all web pages are created and maintained by humans (not spammers) and that if you link to a page then you are essentially casting a vote for the content of this page, kind of like saying “this is good and worth looking at”. Page Rank counts up all the links (votes) that connect to every page on the Internet and totals this up.

Now the algorithm runs again but this time the links are given different weights. If a page receives a lot of links (votes) then links from this page are given more weight than a page with few incoming links. This has the effect that receiving a single link from a highly important page grants more Page Rank than a large number of links from low importance pages.

How Page Rank influences website rankings

It would be easy to say that high Page Rank means high Google rankings but this is not the case. Page Rank is a measure of the importance of a web page but search results need to display websites that are both important and relevant. This is an important distinction as we can improve the Page Rank of a page through increasing the number of high value incoming links but if the page is not relevant to the query then it will still not display on the results page. You can’t increase Page Rank by increasing the number of keywords on a page.

Of course getting a top ranking on Google is a bit more complicated than just getting a high Page Rank. According to Google themselves, there are over 200 factors that are used to rank a web page. Page Rank is just one of these factors, although an important one.

Its all relative!

Page Rank isn’t an absolute measure of page importance, instead its a measure of the importance of a page relative to the importance of other pages on the Internet. This can have an interesting effect when we consider the internal links within a website.

If each page links to every other page on a website then the Page Rank allocated by these links is evenly distributed. However, if these links are not evenly distributed then some pages can receive more Page Ranks than others within the same website. This is an important effect to consider and there are a number of techniques that can be employed to change the internal structure of a website to make sure that the most important pages are given the most Page Rank.

More clicks equals less Page Rank

As site linking structure influences how Page Rank is distributed we must make sure that important content is close to the site’s homepage. This is because most incoming links come to a site’s homepage, this increases the amount of Page Rank allocated to this page. To benefit from this Page Rank, important pages should be linked from the homepage.

Conclusion

Page Rank is a measure of the importance of a page that is determined by the number and Page Rank of incoming links. Although Page Rank is important to Google ranking, it is does not score a webpage’s relevance to a query so must other factors should still be considered. Site linking structure can influence Page Rank and ‘flat and wide’ directory structures create more Page Rank than ‘deep and narrow’ structures.

The simple answer is no with a but… The full answer is a bit more complicated so here we go…

Most people use search engines to find websites rather than typing in a web address on the hope of finding say ‘Accountants in Yorkshire’. So buying new domains  needs to effect your ranking if this is going to be worth it, you can’t expect to get much traffic from people just randomly entering a domain name these days.

You can have multiple domain names pointing at the same website so keeping with the accountancy example we could have a website on

www.accountantsinyorkshire.co.uk

and the same website on

www.yorkshireaccountants.co.uk

However, Google is smart and will know if the same content is available on more than one domain name. This is known as duplicate content and often indicates that you are trying to do something to skew the search engines. In some cases the only thing that happens is that your duplicate content (or website) doesn’t get listed on Google and only the ‘original’ (or older) content does get listed. In some cases the duplicate content is removed and the original content is subject to a Ranking Penalty for trying to skew the results.

So if you can’t use the same website across a number of domains then how about creating a new website on each domain and then linking this to the main website? This is a bit more complicated but you could setup a single webpage on say ‘accountantsinyorkshire.co.uk’ that is 100% focused on attracting visitors who type in ‘Accountants In Yorkshire’. This might be successful in some low competition keyphrases but if you are in a sector with plenty of competitors what you end up doing is splitting your promotional efforts across a number of different websites.

There are some circumstances where building a domain name for a specific keyphrase can be quite useful and thats when you are creating a ‘Landing page’ for use with Google Adwords. This PPC (Pay Per Click) advertising system uses a number of factors to create something called a ‘Quality Score’ which is used as a factor to calculate the pricing of your advertising. This quality score is simply a way of rewarding advertisers whose website closely matches their adverts.

So there could be some merit to buying up some applicable domain names for possible use in the future but I wouldn’t be too bothered – its likely that most of the good ones aren’t available anyway.

To answer your question I don’t see much benefit to buying up additional domain names as this will have little or no impact on your SERP (Search Engine Result Page) listings.

So what will? Here are the top 10 Positive Factors as agreed on www.seomoz.org (a well respected SEO website)

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Anchor Text of Inbound Links
3. Global Link Popularity of Site
4. Age of Site
5. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Structure
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links
7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
8. Keyword Use in Body Text
9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
10. Topical Relationship of Linking Page

I’ve been using the iPhone for a while now and although having mobile email is very handy, it’s sometimes difficult to find important emails in the sea of spam that arrives in my inbox. There are a few products available that can help this but here’s a way you can use Google Mail’s excellent spam filters to do the job.

Firstly log into Google mail and click on the forwarding/POP tab to enable POP download on your account.

Then follow the on screen instructions to set up this email account on your iPhone.

Then click on the Account tab and set up the ’send mail as’ option so that your outgoing email is sent from you@yourdomain.com rather than your.gmail@googlemail.com

Finally, change the settings on your main email account to forward your incoming mail to your Google Mail account.

This will route your incoming mail through Google Mail first before it is downloaded to your iPhone. Thus eliminating your spam problem…

As the first post on our new blog, I thought I would begin by saying goodbye to a dear friend.

For the last 8 years, my work life has been guided by a simple system; the job book. Every day for as long as I can remember, I have started the new work day by ruling off a new line, writing the date and listing the jobs to be done today in the book. Nothing out of the normal I suppose (I like lists) but it has served me well.

But now it’s time to say farewell, as after a few months of dabbling the job book has been replaced by the excellent Omni Focus task manager by Omni Group. It’s based on the GTD approach by Dave Allen and although I don’t use all of Dave’s recommendations the easy to customise interface has certainly worked for me.

I think the final farewell was downloading the 1.1 early release which syncs across macs or iPhones via a mobile.me, shared drive or web DAV server. I only noticed what had happened when the trusty red book was sat unopened on my desk all this week.

So, thanks for your help but now is the start of a new era…