If you want to make money online, you have to know about how the Google PageRank works and how it can help you make money. If you’re smart, you’ll also want to know how you can use that knowledge to your advantage so you can beat the system!

Why PageRank is important

If you want to make money online, Pagerank is important for essentially one reason:

Your site’s PageRank is a factor in Google’s search algorithm that determines how high your site appears in search results.

It’s by no means the only factor, but it is definitely a relevant one.

To see for yourself, do a search for an obscure term in Google and you’ll find the results at the top of the page are generally the ones with the highest PageRank. Therefore, you can assume that having a higher PageRank plays a part in increasing your traffic.

The system is not a secret

Unlike Google’s search algorithm, PageRank is not based upon a secret and magical formula that is kept behind lock and key.

It’s based upon a system developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin (founders of Google) while they were at Stanford University. This system remains the property of Stanford University and is still publicly available. You can easily read all about the general principles behind it from it’s wikipedia entry.

How it works in Google

While there’s little doubt that the system has been developed and changed a little for Google, the basics are still the same.

Pages on your website are given a ranking by Google based upon the ranking of other pages that link to it. The PageRank system as we see it via the Google Toolbar works on a standardized scale of 1-10, so if you have a highly-ranked PR8 site linking to you, your site’s own ranking will increase. The pages linking to you effectively “leak” their PageRank to your site.

But there’s a catch!

How much PageRank is leaked to your site is partly determined by how many outgoing links there are on the linking site. There are a lot of factors (some unknown), but in general terms a PR8 site with 25 outgoing links on the page would give you 8/25=0.32 units of PageRank while a PR5 site with two links on it would give you 5/2=2.5 units of PageRank. For the mathematical minded:

What this means for you

This means that it shouldn’t be your prime objective to just get links from those magic PR9 sites. If those sites have 100 links on the page, you’re really not going to get much value from it. In fact, you’d probably be better off getting a link from a PR3 site with just a couple of links on it.

In your travels around the internet, you’ll see many highly ranked sites charging for links and if you’re interested in making money online, you might want to sell a few links from your own site. What you must consider when purchasing or valuing links is how many other links are on the page.

What you see isn’t what you get

A popular misconception about PageRank is that the ranking shown on the Google Toolbar is the ranking of the site. It isn’t.

A site’s PageRank is updated semi-continuously and stored internally by Google. For any given point in time, Google knows the true PageRank of the site. Every few months, it decides to export that PageRank to the Google Toolbar and the ranking for the site can then be seen by the rest of the world.

What this means is that just because a site has a PRZero on the Google Toolbar, it may just be new and still have a high PageRank in the eyes of Google - and that represents value!

Take advantage of the system

The market dictates that PRZero sites can’t charge a lot for their links. However, these may be highly ranked sites (in the eyes of Google) that simply haven’t had their ranking exported yet.

Hence, one of the easiest and cheapest ways to improve your own PageRank is to purchase links on PRZero sites that you predict will get a high PageRank in the next export.

I’ve recently purchased a number of one-year links on PRZero sites that have few outgoing links for just $20 each. Most of the sitesare owned by hobby-bloggers who barely know what PageRank is, but my research into the amount and quality of links going to these sites gives me the belief that most of these sites will be a PR5-6 in the next export. Hence, they should already have that PageRank stored internally at the moment and it is already flowing to CashQuests.com

Furthermore, once the export happens and the sites have an external PR5-6, I will have paid just $20 for what the market will now dictate to be worth hundreds of dollars.

That’s a great capital gain and once I’ve used the links to generate a high PageRank for CashQuests.com, I can flip the links for a profit.

That my friends, is how you make money online.

Townhomes Hunt Valley