Increase Your Page Rank – Don’t Drain Your Pool – 100 Rules for Bloggers #14

I spend a decent amount of time traveling around the blogosphere, looking at other blogs and sites on the lookout for that latest new thing or hidden online money making technique that I can use to my advantage. And all too often I’ll come across a blog with some odd stats. Take this one below for example:

This site has some decent Alexa rank, a decent number of inlinks to get a Technorati rating of 400, is over 1.5 years old and has close to 750 posts total.  Yet it’s homepage Page Rank is only *2*, despite being a Blogspot blog which can inherit a decent amount of link love from tag pages and the like.

Are the inlinks bad?  Are they faked from junk domains?  Are they all from PR 0 sites?  It doesn’t appear so.  They’re not exactly quality links, but they’ll certainly do.

So what could be the problem with the Page Rank?  One could be this blogger doing something to offend Google, such as buying links.  However, once you look the sidebars over, this appears to be the main part of the problem:

Check out a small sample of the link junk in this image.  Each one is a small page rank leak out of that blog.  This blogger could easily have a PR 4 or possibly even a PR5 if they swept up and cleaned house on the junk links.

Think of your sites relationship to the search engines like a travel agent would see a hotel with a pool.

On one side at the top of the pool are a bunch of fountains and waterslides pouring water into your pool. These are provided by your articles and inlinks, links *from* other pools to your pool, each of them pouring some water in there. Don’t worry, there is a filter on all incoming pool water, so you don’t have to worry about your pool being polluted by inlinks from bad sites. You aren’t penalized for sites linking to yours since it’s not under your control. The better the site linking in, the more beautiful the fountain or slide is.

On the other side at the bottom of your pool are a bunch of holes and waterslides pouring water *out*. These are the site you provide links to. There are no filters on these holes and slides since you placed them there of your own free will. Link to the wrong sites and you’ll get dirty water splashing back into your pool, fouling the water. Link to *too many* sites and you’ll have no water in your pool.

You’re not going to get any business from travel agents if your hotel has a dirty mostly empty pool.

For those of you who argue that Page Rank doesn’t really matter, you’re 150% wrong.  And here is why:

1. If my PR 5 page has 10 inlinks for the term “retired car insurance discount” and your PR 2 page has 10 inlinks for the term “retired car insurance discount”, where all the inlinks are from the same sites, who do you think is going to rank higher on Google, me or you?  Me.  Every time.  Yes, you can add another 20-30 inlinks for that term and maybe pass me, but while you’re working on that, I’ve moved on and have been working on targeting 10 other keywords that are going to bring me traffic and revenue.
2. At PR 2, you can get $5 max for a paid post, most like $1-2.  At PR 5, we’re talking $15-30 per paid post.  Your 20 paid posts a month are going to net you $20-$40.  Mine will grab $400-$500.
3. At PR 2 you can sell Text Links (shhhhhh, I know selling links gets you into trouble with the big G) on your site for $5-10 a month.  At PR 5 we’re talking $25-50 and up depending on your niche.

This one rule is the most important.  It’s the single difference between a blogger making $50 a month from their blog and one making $500-$1000+ per month.

Clean it up!