It is becoming increasingly common knowledge that what you need to get your site high in the rankings of search engines is lots of links pointing at your site. Links have different values however, some are worth more than others. You could rank higher than a site with 20,000 links pointing at it with just 3000 links pointing at your site if all your links were of a better quality.

When calculating how much a link from a given site will be worth, there are several factors that count but you can more or less boil it down the Google Page Rank of the site/page you will be receiving the link from.

Basically, Google ranks every page it comes across (not straight away, they review it every 6 months or so) from zero to ten. Zero being the lowest, and ten of course being the highest. There are pages that Google doesn’t rank that will have Page Rank (PR) n/a, this will most likely mean that Google has not found that page yet, or it is an insignificant page deep within a site, or it could mean that Google doesn’t like that site and could have blacklisted it. You will very rarely see a PR 10 site (apart from google.com) as there are only about 8 in the world.

So what benefits does a high PR present? Well, if you can get a link from a PR 6, 7 or even 8 site, then that will have a much bigger effect of your sites results ranking than a link from a PR 1 or 2 site. PR is basically, how valuable, important, up to date and genuine Google thinks the content of a page is and links basically count as votes to say that a site is worth visiting. So if you’ve got a PR8 site telling Google that your site is worth visiting (i.e. linking to you) then Google will start to favour your site much more.

Having a high PR page does not directly benefit you, but it does mean that you will be in a position to offer better quality links out to other sites, and so you can then request high quality links back. So the higher your PR, the better chance you’ve got of being ranked highly, but only if you do the work to get the links, it wont do anything on its own.

There is almost a catch 22 situation when you first start trying to get your site some PR in that the main thing you need in order to acquire a good PR is quality links. The problem with this is that before you have any PR, people are going to be unwilling to give you a quality link because you wont be able to offer them one back. There is a way around this, but it takes time.

A good way to start your campaign for high quality links is to find sites like yours, not necessarily theme related (although this does help) but sites that are relatively new and are eager to get links. These sites will be a good starting point for your linking because in six months to a years time these sites will have some PR (probably no more than 2 or 3 but that’s still well worth having) and so in the long term will be highly beneficial to your sites search engine rankings, and your PR, meaning you can start exchanging links with higher and higher PR sites.

There are other things that are taken into account when Google calculates your PR. Obviously nobody knows all of them except the people who develop the system, otherwise everyone would manipulate it to give them good PR, but what we do know is that sites that are regularly updated with fresh new content hold far more sway with Google and other search engines than sites that are left for long periods of time.

The reasoning behind this is that if a site has fresh new content every week or every fortnight or so, then the information will be the most up to date and relevant to modern times as opposed to a site that has had the same content on it for a year. Google wants to give people the best, most up to date information related to what they are looking for. If you bear this in mind when starting a PR campaign, along with the correct linking methods, you cant go far wrong.