There’s a great debate today on the real value of PageRank (PR) in SEO, whether or not a high-PR site has a greater chance of ranking high on the search engine.

But you have to be aware though that PR only applies in Google. In fact, it is a Google trademark and patented technology named after it’s co-founder, Larry Page. They invented this algorithm “to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important.” [Source: Google]

Although Google has already stated the PR is not the most important factor in SEO, they acknowledged that it is one of the many metrics that they considered when they rank sites. So it’s can be worthwhile to know and understand PR.

How to Increase PageRank

PR is determined by the number AND the quality of links pointing to a page.

Imagine this scenario:

Let’s say, you’re applying for a job in this high profile company. You’ve got 5 friends who are already employed there but are still in the rank and file position. Then your father also knows someone who is a senior executive in that company. Between recommendations from your 5 rank-and-file friends and 1 senior executive, who do you think will boost your chances of clinching the position?

I suppose your answer is the recommendation from the senior executive.

PageRank pretty much works the same. A single link from a PR 5 page is definitely much better than 500 links from a PR 0 page. So the best way to increase your page rank is not just to acquire as many as backlinks as you can but to consider the quality of the links as well.

Sometimes, you notice that you seem stuck with a PR 3 no matter how many backlinks you gain. This is probably because all your incoming links are from low PR pages. Try to get links from a webpage with a higher PR than yours and you will see the difference.

The Net Value of PageRank

We know that a link from PR 5 is essentially better than a link from a PR 3. But you’ll probably gain more value from a PR 3 page with only 10 links than from a PR 5 page with 100 links because the PR value will be divided among all the links, both internal and external links, found on that PR-giving page. The less links the page has, the more PR it can pass on.

Website PageRank or Webpage PageRank

PR value is an attribute of a webpage. The entire website doesn’t have PR at all. What most people mistook for a high PR site is actually a high PR homepage. When you go to the next page by clicking Previous Posts, Older Posts, Page 2, etc, you’ll notice that the PR will change. Similarly, when you click on a separate post, you will also see a different PR.

Directing the PR Flow

Because of this, some people are doing PR sculpting, a technique that manipulates the flow of PR within a site to distribute the PR value of  high-PR pages to low-PR pages. This is done by linking high-PR pages to low-PR posts to boost their PR and by removing or tagging unimportant links with a nofollow attribute to preserve the link power of the high-PR page.

For example, Post 1 is a PR 5 page while Post 2 is a PR 1 page. In order to increase the PR of Post 2, I can place a link on Post 1 that points to Post 2. To make sure that Post 2 will get the most PR out of Post 1, I need to reduce the number of links in Post 1. I can do that by either removing unnecessary links or putting a nofollow tag in the HTML code of the links.

Common links that can be pruned or tagged as nofollow are:

• Comment links
• Duplicate links such as Category and Page links in both the navigation bar and the sidebar
• Tag links
• Blogroll links
• Irrelevant footer links
• Archive links
• Image host links

But last year, Matt Cutts of Google has revealed that Google will now count even nofollow links in calculating how much PR value a page can give, rendering the nofollow technique useless in page sculpting. This means that even if you made all comment links nofollow, they will still have their share of PR value when it’s divided among the all links found on the page.

So be mindful of the links that you put in your site, especially in the sidebar, and make sure that they serve a purpose. Otherwise, it might be better not to have them there at all.

Nevertheless, it is considered a good practice to link to posts within your site that you think is relevant to your current post to increase page views and encourage your reader to read more and stay longer on your site.

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