How to calculate google page rank?

First things first: What is Google PageRank? It is an algorithm pages. The basic idea behind the PageRank algorithm is the fact that a link (also called hyperlink or backlink) from page A to page B can be seen as a vote of trust from page A to page B. The higher the number of links pointing to a page, the higher its PageRank, and the higher its rankings inside Google's search results. One detail that you need to keep in mind is that each link has a specific value, which is determined by the PageRank of the page where the link is located divided by the total number of outgoing links on that page. For instance, if a page has a PageRank value of 8 and 4 outgoing links, each of those links will pass 2 points of "link juice" (the calculations on the algorithm are more complex, but this is the basic idea). Most people focus on getting external links to increase their PageRank, but they forget that internal links also pass link juice, and this is how you can create PageRank within your websites. Now let me use a simple example to illustrate the concept. Suppose that you just created a website with one page only, the homepage. At this point your website has a PageRank of 0, because it is not even indexed by Google. You then convince a friend to link to your website. The page where the link is placed has a PageRank of 10 and 2 outgoing links, so your website is receiving 5 points of link juice from that link.
The actual PageRank of your website will be 4.25, or 5 x 0.85. This happens because Google applies a damping factor of 0.85 when it makes PageRank calculations (this is necessary else the PageRank of two pages linking to each other would grow to infinite). If you then proceed to create a second page on your website, linking to it from the homepage, that second page will have a PageRank of 3.61 (4.25 from the link it got from your homepage, multiplied by 0.85). And there you go. By adding a second page to your site your managed to actually create PageRank. The cool thing is that when you link that second page to the homepage, they will be sending link juice to each other, back and forth, until the damping factor kills the effect. Now don't worry if you haven't followed the maths. The takeaway message is: every time Google indexes a new page from your website, the total PageRank within your website will also increase. Getting external links is obviously essential to having a high PageRank, but increasing the number of pages that Google indexes from your site can also help, and most people neglect this. Finally, if you want to monitor how many pages Google is indexing from your website, simply search for "site:yourdomain.com" on Google.

How to Get Google to Send Traffic to Your WordPress Blog

After recently moving a number of blogs from Blogger to a hosted WordPress Blog I discovered a BIG problem, Google stopped sending me traffic.

I managed to resolve the problem, and after a lot of hardwork, frustration and after what seemed like a life time, Google has started sending traffic to my new WordPress blog. I naively thought that this would be straight forward process and I wasn't alone as when I first started writing about this issue on my blog I was surprised to find that this is a common problem.

So when I finally found the solution I thought I would create an article and summarise the steps taken to resolve the problem.

It was certainly easier to get Google traffic to a blogger hosted blog as most of this process seemed to be automated.

These are the 7 steps I followed to get Google to send traffic to my WordPress blog:

Step 1: Tell Google your site exists, go to Google's add URL page and enter your sites details.

Step 2: Register an account with Google Webmaster tools. This will give you a meta tag so that you can be tracked by Google's tool set, by using the Google Integration Toolkit plugin for WordPress.

Step 3: Install the Google Integration Toolkit plugin for WordPress. This plugin is useful to integrate a number of different Google tools into your blog i.e. Webmaster toolkit, AdSense, & Analytics.

Step 4: Install the XML-Sitemap plugin for WordPress. This plugin is useful as it automatically creates and updates a XML-Site map of your site. Sitemaps are useful as they help search engines like Google crawl through your site.

Step 5: Install the All in One SEO plugin for WordPress. This plugin allows you to potentially increase your page ranking by incorporating SEO techniques into your blog. When you create a post a new section becomes visible which allows you to fill in a few details for SEO, then the plugin does the rest.

Step 6: Create some internal links. Google appears to like internal links, so I wrote a blog post which linked to every other post.

Step 7: Allow Google to see your site. Make sure your robots.txt file allows Google to crawl through your site - Google WebMaster tools can easily provide a working robots.txt file. There is also an option in the privacy settings of WordPress to block or allow search Engines, make sure this is set to allow.

I hope these 7 steps help some people out there.