I had a pleasant surprise present from Google on the New Year’s Eve. Google did the toolbar PageRank update on 31st December and HowToMakeMyBlog.com jumped from PR0 to PR4.
I registered the domain name on October 24th 2008 and published the first article October 25th so to be Google PR4 just over two months after registration of the domain name is very surprising and feels like a great achievement.
I was thinking about steps I have taken, steps that you can take, to get your blog site to be ranked PR4 by Google in a short period of time.
What is Google PageRank?
Google PageRank is one of numerous factors Google uses to determine the importance of a blog and it is based on the value of your inbound links. Google evaluates how many links there are to your blog from other pages, and the relevance and quality of the linking sites. DigPageRank can help you check your own PageRank.
I believe that the following factors have contributed towards Google assigning HowToMakeMyBlog.com with a PR4:
Guest posting
- I wrote two guest posts at Problogger. Each of these has given my blog a high-quality, relevant inbound link as ProBlogger is PR7 blog.
Links from related high ranked websites transfer more PageRank juice than links from non-related sites.
- Guest post 1: Create A Media Kit To Attract Advertisers To Your Blog
- Guest post 2: Get Inspiration from Blog Comments When Writing your Next Post
Calculate the value of an incoming link by looking at the PR of the linking site, and dividing it by the number of links on that page.
I highly recommend writing guest articles for relevant blogs that are ranked with higher Google PageRank. Read more about how I got guest article spots on ProBlogger.net.
Other inbound links
- Putting my link out there by commenting on relevant and high-profile blogs, being part of social media sites like Twitter and FriendFeed, posting useful answers in relevant forums.
I would recommend taking time each day to work on your blog promotion. Comment on relevant articles, discuss on relevant topics in forums/social media, and in other ways try to get your blog name and URL out there.
Check your PageRank backlinks and see the value of each of them and the anchor text they have linked to you with.
Blog onsite PageRank factors
- Content is not taken into account when PageRank is calculated but writing useful and keyword-rich articles that makes people link to, comment to or submit via StumbleUpon, Twitter and other social media gives you inbound links.
- I regularly updated the blog writing 56 articles from October 25th until December 31st.
- I optimized the internal linking structure.
How is your blog doing with Google PageRank? What did you do well to get where you are? What did you do bad to not be where you want do be?
Have I forgotten some reasons that you think definitely help increase PageRank? From your experience are some of the reasons I have listed not that important?
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There are some great tips here but I would love to hear your take on how capricous the pr ssytem is. I was a 4 but was suddenly dropped to a 0 – I appealed and they gave me back a 2. I know it’s because I have text link advertising on my site but I don’t want to give up the income AND the ads are all relevant to my content so it’s very frustrating. Then I know other bloggers get to keep their high pr even though they have text link ads – I guess Google knows its system will look silly and irrelevant if they pull theirs…
@Don Mills Diva – I do not have much experience with getting penalized by Google. As Google is so powerful I would recommend everyone to play by their rules if you want good rankings and selling text links is against that. There are webmaster guidelines from Google at http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769
intresting …thanks for the info
shall start working on your idea from your blog itself
Vicky
http://www.vickyadvani.blog.co.in
Congratulations. your blog is really good, and very useful for webmasters. Thank
you for sharing this valuable information.
www.
Well done
. congratz 4 u..some time we forget the basic one.. thanx for remind us 
Thank you for the useful tips! Hopefully, this helps my site. I need the pr to move up!
Is Page Rank 4 anything special? I started my blog Nov. 27, 2008, it moved from PR 0 to PR 4 in about six weeks, and I didn’t do anything to provoke that. At least not consciously. In fact, at that time I didn’t even know what a Google PR is. I don’t have much traffic – about 150 page views per day on average. And I certainly haven’t written a lot of key-word rich blogposts. So stop worrying, do your thing, and Google will do the rest.
See, now that’s just irritating. We’ve been constantly tweaknig our SEO practices, we have some high quality links out there, and we are now getting over 500 visits per day from the search engines. But Google still passed us over during the last update and we seem to be stuck at a PR 3. I’m really hoping that the recent guest posting will help us out when the next update happens. I want that 5 already!
@Man Overboard – I wouldn’t really worry that much about PR if search engines already send you so many visitors as @Ulrike Langer says. It is good to show a high PR to potential advertisers etc, but the most important part is traffic and getting over 500 visitors a day from search engines is great! Concentrate on creating new articles to get even more content crawled and indexed by Google and in that way increase your traffic with more long-tail keywords…
@ Man Overboard
If this makes you feel better: I’m stuck at Technorati authority 26. I’m getting a fair amount of links from high profile German blogs, but for the last six weeks or so none of them have shown up in my ”blog reactions”. So they won’t count towards a better Technorati authority and I have decided to ignore Technorati altogether. About Google PR: Isn’t it the case that the more you ”tweak your SEO practices” the more Google notices? I’ve done fine with just letting things happen naturally.
@Ulrike,
That is the first I’ve heard of that, but it certainly makes sense. I’ll definately be looking into it, thanks for the tip.
I’ve seen the same frustration with Technorati. They don’t follow all blogs so they will always miss some of your links. However, this is a statistic that can’t be ingnored should ever attempt to monetize your blog.
I think networking is key to increasing pageranks. If you make friends with bloggers who have high pageranks, most likely they will give you guest blogging opportunities on their blog.
I do believe that “Content is king”, but without networking, it is hard to get the words out about your blog. For those who are struggling with PR 0, do not be discouraged even if you have been stuck with PR 0 for over a year. These people need to accept constructive criticism from other bloggers.
I don’t believe that PR can increase out of thin air. If that is true, nobody would be searching on Google about “How to increase pageranks”. It takes work, and Google will not do the work for you.
Nice ..Glad i found u on bloggerbase:)I have book marked this will be reading soon..Tc
Hi,
Thanks for the various advices for making my blog populor.
I made it from PR 0 tp PR3 in 3 months. Without any a-bloggers linking to me.
I managed to get a new blog of mine from PR0 to PR4 in around 2 months as well. The main cause of this was having many inbound links from high PR (4 & 5′s) websites. Luckily, I had a large network already in place to fall back on when incoming links were needed.
I bought my domain, mimeblogger.com in march. March 3, my blog runs, and last update by google, show my PR increase from 0 to 4. Almost 1 month.
Anw, this site uses Thesis right?! Nice
Thanks for your straight forward tutorial.
We used the methodology that you spoke of here and wallah we now have a page rank of 2! Getting there! Its always good to see efforts that pay off and better yet bloggers that know what they are talking about!
Thanks for sharing your stories guys! I am glad it is working out well for you! Keep working on it!
hey guyz…my page rank was updated from zero to 1 now….
thanks for this excellent post and all the comments out here …which actually helped me increase my page rank…
vicky
Apparently, Google just had a page rank update at the start of this month and unfortunately, my blog is only about a few weeks old so I missed out and it’s on 0. I’m doing a lot to improve it so the next round, hopefully I’ll get at least a PR3. Great tips on how to make the PR higher, though! Even on some of the comments.
Thank You for this post. I guess I did not fully realize that content was not part of the page rank factor. I knew it had a lot to do with links but did not realize content did not make a difference. I need to step it up on internal linking. Thank You
-GatorWade
I understand blogs do take sometime to grow and can take months of
work to do, but over time it is well worth it and i also agree that
understanding pagerank and how it does work can be quite tedious
sometimes when going to different sites because they can vary, and
i agree when finding the right tool that works, a person should
stick with using it.
This was very informative, thanks for sharing.
Great site and some really useful tips. Consider yourself bookmarked!
I’ve been struggling to get some good PR for some of my blogs, so now I have some ideas of what to do to boost their ranks.
Thanks again.
Roger Mayne
Great post and blog. Gave you a Tween ‘n Stumble. I will be back and I am looking forward to more great info. Thumbs Up!!
Is stumbleupon really makes lots of traffic? I just knew that. Before this i just actively used del.icio.us and technorati to generate links. Anyway, great post and excellent content. I’m considering to add your site to my blog for moneymakers gallery for inspiration.
Thanks for the comments, I am glad this post was useful to you!
@xaer8 – I have a more in-depth post about traffic from StumbleUpon. Check out How I Got 2000+ StumbleUpon Visitors Using My 10 Step Strategy.
My blog is currently a PR3 but hopefully on it’s way up as I add to the postings and comment on other sites as well.
Really inspired by you. My target- PR0 to PR 4 in 3months..
Marko — very interesting post, it’s extremely helpful. I’ve been working on building the PR for my blog and I want to ensure I’m following the proper steps.
Thanks for sharing your impressive pagerank experience with us. I will certainly get started on implementing many of your suggestions on my blog.
Those are some great suggestions, Marko. Thanks for the tips! I'll be bookmarking your site.
Thanks for sharing your impressive pagerank experience with us.
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