PageRank – the pixie dust of the pixelverse

The big G accounts for nearly 75% of Internet search traffic. So how to best charm its bots? Especially when the company keeps its 200-point weighting system top secret?

While keywords are crucial, many pages share the same terms in their titles, headers and content. So Google casts its net wider, examining inbound links – and their source's authority, measured by PageRank. You can download a toolbar widget that reports on this status. I dislike clutter and thus prefer a free checker, despite the irritating sales pitches (ignore those).

Let's examine a few:

• Blogging Frontier 0/10
• Mikekeran.com 1/10
• Roadremedies.blogspot.com 4/10
• Writers.com 5/10
• Roughguides.com 7/10
• Boingboing.net 8/10
• Gawker.com 8/10
• Mac.com 8/10
• MSNBC.com 8/10
• BBC.co.uk 9/10
• Facebook 9/10
• Guardian.co.uk 9/10
• Nytimes.com 9/10
• Twitter.com
• Wikipedia.com 9/10

Does this mean we're muppets, incapable of teaching a new media workshop? Nope. The class site's still wet behind the ears – just over a month old. It also has few inbound links, loads of outbound ones and hasn't been submitted to search engines: a perfect storm, really, of PageRank (PR) misery. So do as we say, not as we do...

Personal sites tend to score lower, especially homepages such as Mike's, as he monkeys around with his code too much... Also "no one pays me to update my personal page, so it languishes in the gutter most of the time."

Notice that traditional media outlets still rank very high. For all the "death of journalism" ballyhoo, our society relies on news sources just as much as ever ... maybe even more than ever. We still look to the pros to filter the data stream and convey the important bits accessibly. Does it really matter if they're called "reporters" or "content curators"?

Anyway, enough on that whole upheaval, which could be a class unto itself. Think of PR kinda like high school. Attention (inbound links) boosts your status. Attention from a popular kid, like The New York Times, has even more juju. And attention from the bad kids – link farms – doesn't help on the scramble for cool.

So, to review: inbound links drive traffic to your blog, increasing readership. This is Very Good. We like. And inbound links from authoritative sites also can improve your PageRank (or, as Mike says, "they give you Googlejuice!"). The better your PR, the higher your blog appears when people search, which brings – you got it – more readers!