Anyone who’s worked on websites spends at least a little bit of time wondering how they got earned their Google PageRank. In fact Steve Rubel thinks that PageRank is uber-important:
There are three reasons why Google Page Rank rules.
1) Page Rank is something you earn by producing high quality content that people link to – or what John Bell describes as socially connected
2) It enables you to influence people on the Internet’s biggest
stage – Google – and just as people are searching for the topics you
are knowledgeable about. This means it amplifies your influence because
the press start at search engines when researching stories3) Finally, Page Rank is channel agnostic and takes the entire
online ecosystem into account. It judges you based on links from all
kinds of sources, not just people who live in the same fish tank. In
other words, it goes beyond people who hang out on Twitter who love
people who Tweet or bloggers who link to other bloggers, etc. It
eschews the echo chamberPageRank takes time to earn. There are no shortcuts. Google is
democratic and rewards professionals and amateurs equally if they do
their job well. Create high quality content that earns links from other
quality sources and, over time, your Google Page Rank grows as does
your influence and responsibility.
Here’s the thing, though. I actually have two PageRanks for this blog’s home "page". You see I host this blog on a service called Typepad and there are two addresses you could type into your browser and reach my blog: http://www.jonlowder.com and http://practicalinc.typepad.com/jon. If you type in the first version my PageRank shows up as a "2 of 10" but if you type in the second one I’m a "5 of 10." Exact same content, just different URL. Essentially when someone types http://www.jonlowder.com they get forwarded to the second address, so really you end up in the same place (I think) but it’s interesting to me that they would have different PageRanks. If some smart person could explain the difference I’d sure appreciate it.
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The second one is the one that’s not only more linked, but you gain partial credit from Typepad’s namesake (PR of 8/10). Actually, there are shortcuts to PR, depending on how you do it. That’s exactly what SEO is about. It’s also why some blogs tend to link bait. The more links you earn from sites that have better PR than you, the more you move up the ranks.
There’s a lot more to the mathematics behind it, but that’s why you have 5/10 at one, and 2/10 at another. Oh…. and jonlowder.com is basically a redirect, so it doesn’t gain as fast.