My Blog's Page Rank Increased!

Apparently the search engine optimization I”ve been doing lately has led to an increase of my sports blog”s page rank from 3 to 4 today! Although I didn”t buy any text links from top search engine ranking websites with higher ranking, the link exchange with gambling sites and blogs of similar pagerank certainly helped my sports blog. Additionally, my Alexa link popularity increased while the traffic rank seems steady below 400,000. I managed to improve my page rank after studying a lot about search engine rankings, keywords, seo tools and reciprocal link exchange. What does this increase of my page rank mean though?

First and foremost the increase of your sports blog”s page rank will make your blog more attractive to potential advertisers, thus more advertising income for you. At the moment I have several advertising deals taking place mainly in the front page of my sports blog. Those agreements were made while my blog had a pagerank of 3 and the rewards were satisfactory. The fees will definately increase in the following advertising agreements by a big percentage since they will be more willing to pay a higher price. Improving the pagerank by one unit may not seem like a big deal but in search engine rankings it is. Pagerank is the most accepted ranking algorithm worldwide and almost all advertising is based on it.

Wikipedia article on Pagerank:

A PageRank results from a “ballot” among all the other pages on the World Wide Web about how important a page is. A hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of support. The PageRank of a page is defined recursively and depends on the number and PageRank metric of all pages that link to it (“incoming links”). A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself. If there are no links to a web page there is no support for that page.

Google assigns a numeric weighting from 0-10 for each webpage on the Internet; this PageRank denotes a site’s importance in the eyes of Google. The PageRank is derived from a theoretical probability value on a logarithmic scale like the Richter Scale. The PageRank of a particular page is roughly based upon the quantity of inbound links as well as the PageRank of the pages providing the links. It is known that other factors, e.g. relevance of search words on the page and actual visits to the page reported by the Google toolbar also influence the PageRank. In order to prevent manipulation, spoofing and spamdexing, Google provides no specific details about how other factors influence PageRank.

Then comes the link exchange. Up to now I have been contacted by webmasters or link builders, people who promote websites, and have exchanged links with them. This link exchange is done among pages with good pagerank and the idea is to collect many text links targeting the page you want to improve its ranking. People often offer linking from pages with same pagerank as yours and ask to put up a link on your page driving traffic to more established pages, that is with much better pageranks. Therefore, I used to receive linking to my sports blog from PR3 pages. Now I am able to ask for better link exchange which means reciprocal links from PR4 pages which will lead in higher search engine ranking.

Finally Google will crawl the blog or site more often due to the increased inbound or incoming links.