Link Building Tips From Experts - Toolbar Pagerank is Useless. Now What?
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Hamlet Batista shared a killer link analysis tip, using nothing but Google data. Let's lay it out for you.
First, Google Toolbar's Pagerank is somewhat useless in SEO.
Toolbar Pagerank is not real. Google has a different internal number than the one displayed. It's safe to say that toolbar PR is an approximation of real PR. It is a rough, rounded number.
Google can reduce toolbar PR for any site, without a website losing search rankings or traffic. This happened when Google declared war against paid links. It lowered toolbar PR for sites that sold or bought links, but it didn't have any effect on search engine rankings or traffic.
Toolbar PR is updated once every three months. Google may update internal PR, but leave toolbar stats unaffected.
Toolbar pagerank does not indicate trust or the authoritativeness of the site, which are becoming more and more important.
Faced with this reality, Hamlet Batista came up with a simple and effective method to value potential links:
Search engines crawl and index important pages, say the New York Times home page, more frequently so that search results look up to date. By studying the crawling and indexing rate of a page we can have an indirect measure of its true value for link building.
Crawling is when a search engine spider explores pages and makes a copy to the servers for later analysis.
Indexing is when a page is actually ranked by algorithms on search results.
Crawling and indexing do not happen simultaneously. There may be a difference of up to a month, depending on site authority.
Finding out the crawl rate of a web page is easy. Go to search results and search for any keyword of your choice. Once you see search results, click on "Cached" next to a link.
On top of the page you will see a small Google tab that has details about the page. It will say something like: "This is Google's cache of http://www.seochat.com/. It is a snapshot of the page as it appeared on 20 Oct 2008 06:38:06 GMT. The current page could have changed in the meantime. Learn more"
The info we're after is "snapshot of a page." It tells us when Google last crawled the page (not indexed).
In order to determine the crawl rate you need to monitor "cached" information about a website.
Websites that are crawled once per month may not offer such good links, while ones that are a crawled every day or once in a few days should have more value.
Checking when the page was indexed is a little different. You have to go to the advanced search options and apply the date range filter. Specify the date range (24 hours, past week or past month) and do a search. You will see that the crawl date and index rate differ, where even newly crawled content is not indexed yet.
Monitor the rate at which the page is indexed. The more often a page is indexed, the more "important" it is, hence a link from that page will be treated as an "important" one.
Index and crawl rate also depend on the frequency with which the webmaster updates the site. If Google spots a trend that the site is updated once a week, it may adjust Google-bot to come once a week, so this measurement is not always perfect.
Here's a useful diagram by Hamlet.
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