Most people install the Google toolbar or some other plugin that displays the Page Rank of each website so they can assess the authority of a website or a page. But should you really take that figure as gospel?

Possibly not. It is possible to ‘fake’ the page rank of a site and when it comes to link building you want to make sure you are getting the full benefit of every link you build.

Firstly, let’s ask the obvious question – why would somebody try to fake their Page Rank?

It obviously takes a certain kind of person to mislead the public for financial gain. Maybe they are looking to sell their site and want to push for a higher price. Maybe they sell links on their site and again want a higher price per unit. Maybe they just want to appear as an authoritative source of information.

When you think about it, there are many possible reasons for wanting to inflate your Page Rank value, all of which are very misleading to the public and result in financial gain for the owner.

Still, help is at hand and you can check up on this. A quick search in Google for ‘check fake page rank’ or similar will bring up plenty of results that have ways of checking whether the PR of any site or page is real.

Simply enter your URL and it will run a couple of checks to help give you confidence when it comes to adding a link to your site on somebody else’s page. Pages with fake PR are quickly highlighted.

Quick, simple and effective.

Following on from last week’s post about what to look for in a page before you post a comment, I wanted to touch on the new method I’ve discovered (although I’m sure many others are already doing this) to help you decide which post within a particular blog is going to give you the best return on your link building efforts.

When you do come across a blog that is closely relevant to your niche and has many posts that make ideal candidates for your comment posting, you might want to look at which pages of that site are better when it comes to the value of the link in your post.

A fantastic technique I’ve been employing a lot more lately reshuffles the listings in the search results and orders them by PR, allowing you to hand pick the pages with the best link value and select the most relevant page to post your comment from your shortlist. Here’s how.

You’ll need:

• An internet browser
• SEO Quake plugin
• An industry-relevant blog

Use the ‘site:’ search query to list all of the pages of the site you want to comment on. For example, enter “site:domain.co.uk” into the Google search box, where ‘domain.co.uk’ is the industry relevant site you want to publish a comment on.

Click ‘Advanced search’ and set the number of results per page to ’100′. You’ll need to switch ‘Instant Search’ off for this (see ‘Search Settings’ in the upper right).

Ensure your SEO Quake plugin is displaying within your search results. It usually displays a horizontal bar of icons below each and every result in the search engine.

Click the ‘Request Parameters’ button at the very top of the search results and it will check the PR value of every page listed (up to 100). I’d recommend setting the delay between each query to 3000-4000ms or higher to avoid getting your IP address blocked by Google. Another method is to look over the search results and click ‘PR’ underneath the most relevant of titles to help reduce the number of requests you’re making.

Now, at the very top of the search results next to the word ‘Sort’, you’ll see a series of arrows pointing up and down. Within the PR section of this area click on the arrow pointing down and this will re-sort the search results into descending order so that the highest PR pages appear at the top of the search results.

The results now appearing at the top of your search are the pages with the highest PR value. Not all will be blog posts, but you can make a good guess as to which are and which aren’t and you can use this to prioritise the posts you want to look at and spend time reading over before you place your all-important blog comment.

Give it a go and see what you find. Next week I’ll be looking at ways to improve the quality of your blog comment and increase the chances of it being approved by the author.

Tip: You can also sort the results by the number of links pointing to each page, by sorting the results by Yahoo Links (not Yahoo LinkDomain) which might help identify pages popular with links yet haven’t yet achieved a PR value but might do soon.

Have any other tips? Feel free to share your thought and techniques by commenting below.

Part 2: Increase your page rank using internal linking.

Internal linking is an important part of your internet marketing and  internal linking is a system of  creating links between the web pages of your site.  Ensuring that the pages flow from one another well  makes the users experience of navigating your site better. I explained in part one when talking about external linking how these links are confirmation to Google from other websites, of  votes for what pages within your site are of quality and worth reading, internal linking is a chance to let your website have a vote too.  If  your internal linking is done properly it can ensure that the page rank your site receives flows through your pages.

When Google looks at your site to asses what page rank it will receive, they calculate the amount and quality of back links that are present and as explained in part 1 the external links play a very important part in this and the sources of these links need to be of good quality and have a page rank themselves.

When a websites page rank is calculated, internal links, are also taken into consideration by Google too so its important to ensure that these are not something that is forgotten about or equally that they are not created without the system I will explain here into consideration.

Most websites are built in a hierarchical design with the index page being at the top of the hierarchy. Next would be the second level pages, then the third level and fourth level depending on how large the website is and how deep your structure goes.

Most external links point to the index page and as the index page has the most authority in a website it has the highest page rank out of the pages of a site.

This page rank and the strength of it can then be harnessed through the rest of the site if the internal linking is structured properly. Care and consideration however needs to be taken when doing so as not to produce a negative impact on the page rank of the index page.

For example a website which has an index page with a Page Rank (PR) 5 will, if the linking has been done properly have this PR filter down to the second level of pages giving them a PR4. This PR will gradually dilute as it is filtered down the levels of the website, so level 3 will have a PR3 and Level 4 a PR 2.

Deeper level pages within a website can often be seen by Google as less important but with this structure you can ensure that the PR reaches these other pages too making Google take more notice of them and your website overall. The way to achieve such a concise flow of page rank is by ensuring the correct levels of your site link to the correct other levels of your site in the right manner.

• Index page should link to your second level pages.
• Second level pages should link back to the index page and link to each other to ensure they all receive an equal share of the passed on page rank . In addition you should link these pages to the third level sub pages that come from these second level pages.
• Third Level Pages should link back to the second level page they where linked from and if there is more than one page in their sub domain these can in addition be linked to each other. Only do this  if they provide a relevant, similar themed link to each other. Do try to keep this linking to a minimum on the third level.
• Fourth Level and deeper pages should follow the third level method.

In addition to this it is important to internally link to pages of similar subject and theme. When you create your link ensure that the text you use within your links are your main keywords for each page you are linking to.

A websites maximum page rank it can achieve is determined by the number of pages it has and as the amount of pages increase the amount of total website PR potential increases. This PR is distributed across the site to boost the whole site making its overall PR strength grow. The way to then increase this further is by adding more external PR from a constant program of external linking from sites with good PR .

Google states that it only indexes pages that have a minimum of one external link pointing towards it, so for the internal links you build to have maximum effect, you need to structure your linking program to give each page you want to use to make the page rank flow, at least one external link.

You should also bear in mind that all links you have pointing out of your site can reduce the page rank you have built if you are not careful by passing your page rank to external sites. To avoid this common mistake you need to ensure that your outbound links have the rel=”no follow” attribute included in the link text within the coding of your site.

Link building for a website is something that needs to be a constant thing and if you ensure that your internal linking system is correct then your can concentrate on your external linking knowing that the internal flow of page rank will continue to grow in a balanced concise manner.

When considering SEO, a link building strategy is one of the many options that should be considered.

When deciding on the ranking of a website, the amount of links coming into a site is a major factor that influences the decision that Google makes.
So, how does this work in practice? When Google uses its robots to check through the websites on the internet, it recognises links on the sites pointing to other web pages. As an example, say you put a link on your website to www.seo-creare.co.uk .

When Google checks the sites it would notice this link and would see this link as a “vote” for this site. Simply put, the more “votes” a site has, the more relevant it is seen as, and the higher the page ranking. This is a fairly simplistic view, as there are other factors to consider, but it still holds true.
So, are all these “votes” given the same weight by Google? The simple answer is no. Links from sites that have a high ranking are deemed to have more influence. A link from www.e-commercewebdesign.co.uk (a page rank of 4) to www.seo-creare.co.uk  would not be given as much weight as a link from www.bbc.co.uk (a page rank of 9) for example.

From this you can see that the link system does have to take vote strength into account. The number of links coming into a site can still be a good indicator of the relevance of a particular page, but its important to consider that one hundred low quality links to a site may not have the same influence as one or two very high quality ones.

So, when embarking upon a programme of search engine optimisation, take these factors into account if you wish to give your site the best start possible.