I’m sure you’ve all read several ‘build PageRank quick’ guides in the past, however, all is not as it seems.

Why share the secrets if they work for you? Disinformation abound. I try to debunk many of the common myths of pagerank and site building. Take a look.

1. PageRank == better SERP ranking/Traffic

It is important to first realize that PageRank is not site rank. If your homepage ranks PR7 and the rest of your pages rank poorly, it doesn’t matter how good the content is on them. You can completely screw up your page wide PR if your main page with all your valuable google juice ™ links off to 100 other pages and doesn’t let the juice flow naturally to your own pages. Passed on pagerank decreases with each additional link, as it divides up the PR.

I agree that pagerank is great for convincing advertisers to link on your pages, but it is arguable how much of an influence it will actually have on ranking in SERPs and subsequently traffic. It always comes down to content first. I’ve seen PR1 pages rank above PR5 pages for keywords, so it’s not instant ‘oh I will rank well for this’ on anything. The more natural and keyword focused your promotion and content, the better.

There is also a notion of TrustRank, and many other statistics that google uses to determine SERPs. PR really doesn’t mean a whole heck of a lot. It is kind of a side effect to sites becoming popular.

2. You should create 100 domains, and make them into one mega-domain

Many methods work on a ‘pyramid’ of sorts. You build up a lot of low ranking sites then combine them into one big crazy mega-site. There are a couple problems with this, and some truth to it. The first problem is cost. Assuming all .com TLDs, you are looking at 8.95/yr (godaddy) per crap domain name you create (and yes you need to keep those domains as long as you run this method, once the backlinks stop, the rank stops). I personally do not see a real need for this. A cheaper method than registering X crap domains would be to use subdomains. Supposedly google considers each subdomain a separate domain/entity, so you would really only need to spam yourself 1 domain with separate subdomains. Of course, this makes it more identifiable as spam to pages you post to, but you are spreading the wealth enough (hopefully) anyway, that it wouldn’t matter. Or, it is also likely that even subdomains are not necessary and you can merely create X pages and promote each deep link individually and it would have the same effect. Again, it’s called pagerank, not siterank for a reason.

3. Post all links to Social Networking Sites because it builds huge backlink value

Listing your pages on social bookmarking sites (digg, reddit, netscape, newsvine, whatever) gets you a *temporary* PRX backlink. After a couple weeks, days, or hours, you will be off the front page and likely on page 40, which has PR of about 0, and google indexes these sites often, so your page rank will reflect changes. Also the page has a high pagerank, but links off to 30 or so other links, so the effect on your site is going to be so minimal you are probably better off doing something else.

However it is important to note the joy of linkbaiting, which means writing articles so provocative or informative that other bloggers will see it, and feel the desire to write about it in their own blog. Getting a page on the front page of Digg usually has this effect. So, not only do you get a link on the PR8 homepage for a little bit, but also usually 5 to several hundred bloggers will blog about the news themselves and almost always give you a backlink. And this backlink will be both relevant and valuable. Maybe not all the bloggers have huge blogs, but you do get natural and keyword relevant backlinks for nothing. I won’t go into how you would actually get an entry to the front page of Digg, as it’s either really easy or impossibly hard depending on the content (and how much you consider Digg ‘gamed’ at the moment).

4. Posting comments/trackbacks on blogs is bound to help

Getting your comments on the biggest blogs will usually do nothing for your google rank as most, if not all of them use nofollow to stop people from commenting just to get a link, so this method holds no help for google pagerank. Google really does not follow no follows, so they completely ignore your comment link. That being said, it can be very useful to comment on dofollow blogs, as they do pass on google love to you. Just make sure you actually read the post and post a relevant comment. If not, people will just delete your comments, and you did all that work for nothing. I am not going to endorse trackback solutions, as they all seem to target nofollow blogs anyway, but there are methods to build these types of links quickly, but you are much more likely to be banned at a larger level (there are plugins to wordpress to tap into a global commenting system which checks for spam. Posting 500 automated trackbacks/comments in 5 minutes is a huge flag for these sites).

5. Step X, get your spammy sites posted on DMOZ

So many of these guides just tell you to post your site(s) to DMOZ and that will magically build rank. DMOZ is not some automated site that will accept any crap you throw at it. It has human editors that check submissions and really look at your site. DMOZ is also notorious for taking ages to get listed, and it really is unlikely that your shady quickly built domains are *ever* going to get by the human filter that is DMOZ. A site with some shady content or a site just starting up with not a huge amount of value on its own is ever going to get listed on DMOZ, unless there’s some category out there with some editor that just doesn’t give a shit. The whole point of DMOZ is to only link to those sites that are actually relevant and well built. Your sites will be neither of those. After you are already big and popular and fully built out, go ahead and submit, but it under no circumstances is a ‘first step’ to building links. By the time you are ready for DMOZ, you really won’t need the backlink anyway.

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