March 9th, 2010 by Dan

Something that many sites seek is an improved PageRank and TrustRank. This is almost seen as the SEO nirvana. The way to get there – through a carefully researched and implemented link building strategy which will steadily increase your authority, your online profile and thus your search engine rankings.

PageRank is a rather complicated algorithm that is quite old now but still perceived as an important measure of a particular page’s worth in SEO terms. Before going into it in detail, it’s worth stating that Google doesn’t rely on it nearly so much as they did in the past. However, similar things are still in use in a few places around the internet and understanding PageRank will help you get to grips with what’s going on behind the scenes of search engines and why link building strategies are so important.

Consider your page as part of a network of pages connected by links. Some of those links go one way, some go both ways. Some sites have a lot of links, some sites have a few. Now, imagine starting at any point in the network and clicking through links randomly. Because some sites have more incoming links from others, you will land on these popular pages more often than a small page with only one or two links going to it. So, more links going in lifts your PageRank.

But, because those popular sites we just identified have a lot of links going in, the links going out are also important. What if one site with a lot of incoming links had only one outgoing one? That would mean that the site at the end of that outgoing link gets just as many visits as the popular one, because it gets all the leaving traffic. So the quality of the linkages to upstream pages (the ones that link to you) is also important, and PageRank takes it into account too.

Enter early and none too scrupulous search engine optimisation methods. It’s quite possible to build a huge number of links automatically. You will still see these services on sale, despite the fact they are worse than useless and far more likely to damage your rankings than improve them. It’s also still common to be emailed by people who own sites that are full of links that are of little or no relevance to your business, proposing link exchanges to build up your number of links ‘for Google’. Again, it won’t help your SEO efforts. Google is fully aware that PageRank can be manipulated and has reacted accordingly, so search engine optimisation has to be smarter than that.

TrustRank is PageRank getting clever. It is current technology and used by engines today. Go back a bit and visualise that network of websites again. Now, imagine a little agent- an actual person- inspecting one of the bigger sites. A real person can tell if a website is really good much more easily than a machine. So, the inspector says yes, this is a great page. Relevant, useful, and spam free. Now that page is established as trustworthy. The assumption that good pages only link to good pages isn’t a bad one, like judging a person by the quality of their friends. So, by inference, the pages downstream of the known-to-be-good site (we say the site ‘has high authority’ in SEO speak) get a little bit of trust and authority by association, and that flows across the network.

So, for search engine optimization purposes, it’s not the number of links that counts, although having incoming links is important. What you really need is to find link building strategies that will get you links from the right websites.