The Secret to Increasing Page Rank?

Yaro Starak recently speculated that the way to increase your page rank quickly was to have a higher PR page link to you. And he concluded that that's all there is to the secret of getting a higher page rank. And that the wonderful result is that your site will be awarded a page rank just one less than the PR of the page that linked to you.

Everyone knows you can increase your PR by getting more links. The interesting new speculation is that your PR can quickly move up to just one level less than the highest ranked site that links to you.

In this last PR update, I've found this is true.

I've had three or four blogs for a year now. But none of them rank above PR3. I started my newest blog just three months ago. Soon after, a PR5 site linked to it off the blogroll section of their main page.

And as a result, in the latest PR update, I suddenly jumped from PR0 to PR4 for this brand new blog. I was quite surprised, as one of my PR3 blogs has a loyal and relatively large audience but it did not budge in PR and suddenly this newest upstart beat it and was now the highest ranked blog in my little stable.

Mind you, a few PR4 and PR3 sites have also linked to this new blog. So it may be that you not only need one higher level PR site to link, but also several lower level ones.

If this is indeed the underlying mechanism of how to increase page rank then it has some huge implications for people who want to be found on Google's search pages.

It provides another reason why blogs may have an advantage over corporate sites. How many people are going to link to Home Depot off their main page for example? I ran across one beautifully developed site with hundreds of quality content pages. It's a hardware store that has over 100 retail outlets in North America. Their page rank? Zero PR. Who is going to link to them off their main page? Very few people. They will get links from within individual posts but this will not help their page rank status.

But if you have a popular blog for example, you are much more likely to get many more high-level links.

As your page rank definitely affects where you stand in the search engine rankings, this will create an advantage for blogs over corporate sites. The spam blogs will continue to have low or zero PR but the quality blogs with many links will be able to get first search page listings.

If PR works this way, it also means more people will be sucking up to the higher PR blogs in the sense of asking for links. The higher PR blogs (six and above) will be able to charge for links to other sites off their main pages.

If this is indeed the key secret to increasing page rank what else would this result imply?

Doubling Google Profits Overnight

Here's a thought on how Google could double their profits overnight by making some changes to their ad server.

If you are displaying Google ads on your website or blog, you already know about CTR. It is the click-through rate your site generates at any given time. If you get two clicks on ads for each 100 page views from your visitors, your CTR is two percent.

I have a couple of different sites and the CTR varies enormously - not just between different sites but also on a day to day basis depending on what pages people are landing on and what the individual posts are about.

But if you're wondering who gets the very highest CTR's, the answer is the initial Google search page where people begin their search. I don't know what the exact CTR rate is here (does anyone have this info?) but I know it averages way higher than on Google's partner sites.

(Update February 24th: Just saw this same question posed at the Search Engine Roundtable:

What percentage of search engine users click on paid listings and what percentage click on organic results (paid inclusion listings aside)?

Forum moderator Chris D posts the following stat from a 2004 iProspect report: On the Google search page - 72.3% of people click on the organic listings, while 27.7% click on paid ads.)

This is an incredibly high click-through rate for ads on the first search page!

You might think it is obvious people would click more here as it is the first page they look at and if they are seeking something very specific - especially product or service related - they will immediately be exposed to ads by people selling precisely that product.

But the other advantage that the Google search page has in comparison to Google ads showing on your site, is that the actual ads that show up are precisely targeted to the actual keywords that people have typed in.

For example, if someone is seeking information about 'hybrid cars' and they type in these two keywords, they will find a lot of ads on the Google search page which are precisely geared to their search.

However, if they ignore these ads and scroll down to find a website with info about 'hybrid cars', they may land on your page at some point if your page mentions this term.

And once they've landed on your page, it often turns out that the main topic on this page is not the same one as they were searching for; that 'hybrid cars' is just a small part of what this page is about and hence none of the Google targeted ads are going to be displaying it on this page. Instead, as you now see on this page as an example, you are going to be seeing ads about Google and how to make money with online advertising.

So basically the click-through-rate is bound to be lower, because the ads that show on your page are not targeted to the actual search terms that bought people to your site, but are rather targeted to the keywords that are most often found on your site.

Now what does this have to do with Google doubling their profits overnight?

If there was some way for Google to serve ads on your site that related not just to the words found on your site, but also took into account the actual search terms that bought each visitor there, you would automatically see a huge surge in CTR's because the ads would be much more relevant to readers. The click-throughs on websites would now come close to the very high CTR averages on the main Google search result page.

Right now about 55 percent of Google's revenue is from clicks on ads on their search-page results. But the other 44 percent is their share of the revenues that come from clicks on publisher partner sites.

So if Google was able and willing to set the ads serving on partner sites to be dependent on the actual search term that led people to these sites, publisher clickthroughs would probably go through the roof - I would guess up by a minimum of five hundred percent.

I'm totally ignorant of what kind of technical and privacy issues would be involved in changing the ad server to take this into account. And I'm not sure about how this would change the spamming, keyword abuse side of the equation. Would love to hear any thoughts anyone has on this.

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The above art print is 'Double Scoop' by Jennifer Sosik

Google Stock: Barron's doesn't Get It

It's taken over twelve years since the inception of the web, but the Internet is now tied with TV as the the main source of entertainment for most people. The average online user is now surfing 14 hours a week online. Compare this to one hour a week reading magazines, two hours a week looking at newspapers, and five hours a week tuning into radio. For all people who use the internet at least once a month, their time online is now tied to TV watching, which also averages 14 hours a week.

These are the results of a recent Jupiter Research Study which interviewed 3,000 people who go online at least once a month from home, work or school.

And yet, advertisers are still not online in a big way. Internet advertising has only recently tied yellow page advertising volumes which total about five percent of total advertiser spending. It's nowhere near what advertisers are still spending on newspapers, magazines and TV. The huge multi-million dollar advertisers are still allocating only relatively tiny portions of their ad budgets to the web. The same goes for the millions of small businesses, which may on average spend a few thousand dollars a year for marketing but are still in the habit of handing over these dollars to local newspapers, magazines, radio and yellow pages.

Basically there is a lot of catching up to do for advertisers to switch over to that new venue where their customers are actually hanging out these days. And we are talking hundreds of billions of dollars annually.

Internet advertising (especially contextual advertising via the search engines and participating websites) is the future of where the bulk of advertising dollars will go. Many of these dollars will find the new sweet spot sometime in the next couple of years. Any analyst who doesn't understand this just doesn't get it.