The Clickable Search Engine Marketing Blog

There are many ways to increase your Google Page Rank and Quality Score. Doing so helps lower your costs per click and improves your paid search ad performance. The great thing is, the same principles that are used to improve Quality Scores for your landing pages can also be used to improve organic (non-paid) search results for pages throughout your site.
 
There are many blog posts, forums, and resources out there for improving your Page Rank. While some offer great tricks and advice, others offer ideas that go against Google’s Terms of Service.  Below are some examples of strategies that have worked out poorly for advertisers in the past. Hopefully, additional awareness will help us learn from their mistakes.
 
Avoid Paying For Bad Links
A fundamental part of Google’s Page Rank is based on “link equity.” If you think of every page on a Web site as a political candidate, and every link to that page as a vote, you can understand how Google ranks some pages above others. 
 
So having more links point to your page means that you receive a higher Page Rank.  There are ways to purchase links from other Web sites and from companies who sell links as a business.  But purchasing links is against Google’s terms of service.  It may seem like an easy win, but Google has been catching people doing it and banning their sites from Google search results. 
 
There are a few links out there that are legitimate and are worth going after. Two good links to have are a DMOZ and a Yahoo Directory listing. Otherwise, be sure to research links before you pay for placement. Not all links are equal, and building link equity is a slow process that is best done carefully, over time. 
 
Keep Your Site Away From Those Trying To Steal Link Equity 
My clients have quickly learned that any comment-enabled content or forum where people can express their opinions, can quickly turn into a spam thread if there aren’t proper guidelines set up for posting a link. 
Find a CAPTCHA program to prevent automated spamming in a forum or comments section of a blog.  If there is significant moderation occurring, it may not be necessary to implement a CAPTCHA program, but it can still be useful. Set a standard "nofollow" tag on any comment or post. "Nofollow" prevents someone who posts a link in his comments on a blog, or in forums, from garnering link equity from your Web site. 
 
Keep an Eye Out for Changing Policies
Search engines are constantly changing their terms of service and the way they work. Staying up-to-date on these changes can prevent huge headaches when issues arise, and it can also put you ahead of the curve when new opportunities to optimize your Web site come along. 
 
You may have a lot of questions about this post, and we’d love to answer them – please post your questions in Clickable’s newly-launched Forums.
 
Trace Johnson, Clickable SEM Guru

Note: Clickable employees volunteer several hours a week to helping other search marketers succeed. "Clickable Gurus" participate in numerous online search communities to provide straightforward answers to numerous questions, and, each week, one of the gurus posts a search marketing tip to the Clickable Blog.