Facts and Myths: How to Increase Page Rank

If you ask twenty different search engine optimization marketing professionals how to increase Page Rank, you'll probably get twenty different answers. The problem with asking these pros about ways to increase Page Rank is that many of them are selling their own systems. Keeping sales numbers up sometimes means promoting ideas that are unproven, outdated, or just plain wrong. In this guide, we'll take a look at some of the facts about how to increase Page Rank, but also the myths perpetuated by SEO pros.

FACT: You Can Increase Page Rank With Traffic

When learning how to increase Page Rank, the single biggest thing you can do for your website is to bring more traffic in. More traffic almost always equates to an increase in Page Rank. How you draw traffic in is, of course, entirely up to you. Traffic numbers will still matter even if you're bringing it in with paid advertisements. In fact, when you're first learning how to increase Page Rank, it can be useful to bring traffic in with paid ads just to get the first couple of levels out of the way.

MYTH: If You Increase Page Rank, Traffic Goes Up

If your Page Rank goes up when your traffic goes up, does that mean that your Page Rank increase will translate to more web traffic? The answer, sadly, is no. If any marketer is telling you how to increase Page Rank so that your website will gain in popularity, you're putting the cart before the horse.

Google keeps track of PageRank dynamically and in real time. What this means for you is that even though you'll only see an increase in Page Rank when it is rounded up to the next integer value, your Page Rank could be slowly increasing for a long time. While going from a 4 to 5 may look exciting, it won't make a big difference to your search results because all that really happened was that your rank went from a 4.49 to a 4.51.

FACT: Your Total Page Rank Matters

When learning how to increase Page Rank, you should focus not just on increasing the PR value of your main home page, but on an increase in Page Rank values throughout your website. This is because in addition to considering the Page Rank of the page a link comes from when indexing search results, Google also takes into account the overall PR value of the website, including all of the pages that the search engine currently has indexed. Anyone who wants to know how to increase Page Rank should be concerned with more than just their front page—otherwise, it's like wanting to know how to improve your house, but only by painting the front door a brighter color.

MYTH: The Page Rank of Your Inbound Links Doesn't Matter

A few years ago, if you tried to increase the Page Rank of your inbound links pages, it would have made some, but not much, impact. Today, learning how to increase Page Rank is even more critical for your inbound links. Many search engine optimization services today specialize in ways to increase the Page Rank of inbound links to give them more link juice.

Keep in mind that if you have too many inbound links with a very low (PR value of 0, usually) Page Rank, you can actually find yourself being penalized. That's because many websites that have this kind of linking pattern for their inbound links are actually doing artificial, black hat link building. They spam blog comments on unmoderated blogs rather than trying to create real buzz with their own content, and Google isn't stupid—the search algorithms notice, and fast.

FACT: You Can Increase Page Rank Faster With Original Content

If you think that you know how to increase Page Rank for your website, and it involves using great content that other people have already made, think again. Google actually makes it much easier to increase Page Rank values if you're creating something that doesn't exist anywhere else on Google so far. Google's focus is on delivering the best original content and the most relevant contextual results, so the more you can do to move your website toward those goals, the more likely you'll learn how to increase Page Rank for your web pages organically.

MYTH: Downloading Google's Toolbar Can Increase Page Rank

Some search engine optimization experts swear that just downloading the Google toolbar is a good way to start increasing your PR values. While this is a piece of advice that gets trotted out in dozens of “how to increase Page Rank” articles, it's never been proven to work. Now, it's true that you can use Google's toolbar to check your Page Rank and monitor its progress, but nothing about using it will increase your Page Rank value particularly.

FACT: Social Networks Help Increase Page Rank

Remember how we said that traffic is the number one contributor if you want to know how to increase Page Rank? One of the best ways to get traffic coming into your website is to post links on social networking and social bookmarking websites. Often, a post on one of these sites will give you a high PR link for a short time, and then it will retreat to a lower PR as people stop reading it. However, in the meanwhile, you may receive more links on more blogs and other news sources, each of which will contribute a high quality, contextual, high PR backlink to your site.

MYTH: Large Numbers of Inbound Links Increase Page Rank

Simply having a huge quantity of inbound links is no way to increase your Page Rank. Low PR value links, as we've mentioned, can actually hurt it. You should work hard to build links not just for their value to your Page Rank, but for their value as contextual linkages between your website and other people's sites. When you look at links in this way, you'll be much more likely to build quality link structures—and that, in turn, is more likely to increase your Page Rank than any other strategy you can have.