Make Money With Adsense

Google PageRank is a patented and trademarked process used only by Google and nobody else.  It is important to have a good understanding of pagerank if you want to learn how to make money with adsense.  It is also important for you to know the following two facts about page rank.  First, Google page rank is not the same thing as Search Engine Results Page or SERP.  You can still be number 1 in a Google search with a pagerank of zero.  Second, unless you are the one who will be giving a link to some other website, your own pagerank is irrelevant.  What is important is the number of back links you receive from other websites and the page rank of the website and web pages that link to you in order to pass your competition and move into the top search positions in Google.

Google does an excellent job of summarizing page rank as shown below.

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.

What you just read has two important takeaways.  First, one way links to your website are important and is what helps move you to the top in a Google search.  This is also the same as saying two way link exchanges are not desirable.  I am not going to get into the whole concept of link farms as to not violate the Google rules or terms of service as you can certainly find enough information on that topic yourself, but what you should take away from this is your link exchanging should only have one way links.  You provide the reciprocal link to your partner from a different website.  Enough said.  The second takeaway is that when Google refers to an important website, they mean websites with a high page rank.

Google assigns a pagerank value to all websites indexed in the Google search engine a value between zero and ten.  All new websites that are freshly indexed in Google start out with a value of zero.  There are only a few websites that rank at PR10, less than 100.  If your website were to receive a backlink from a related PR10 website, you would likely rank number 1 for your keywords in a Google search without any further effort.  Google updates page rank approximately once per quarter.  Nobody knows the exact dates this will happen.

Let’s explore these PageRank values and try to put them into perspective.  The formula Google uses to assign a web page a page rank is a proprietary and complex algorithm.  I am not going to even attempt to explain the formula here as it is not entirely relevant.  What I am going to do is dumb it down a little in such a way that a human can understand it by showing you this graph I found on a webmaster forum.

The chart is a little confusing at first.  Remember, you are not too concerned about your own page rank.  You are concerned about the pagerank of those that link to you as well as the pagerank and backlink structure of the competition that you are wanting to unseat in a Google search.  Further, different pages in a website can have different page ranks.  For our purposes, pretend that your competitions website and all of their web pages ranked at PR5.  To unseat them, you would need more than 13,442 backlinks from websites that were rated as PR1.  Or, you would need at least 3 PR6 backlinks.  Please do not take this as gospel as nobody knows the exact formula and page rank is not the only method by which you are judged.  Some credibility is lent to the number of visits you get as well as the relevancy of the referring website to your website.  Keyword anchor text in the link plays a role as well.  Consider this more of a guide, or a starting point to see if you really want to take on the competition for the top spot.

You have probably noticed by now that not a whole lot has been said about other search engines.  Obviously, ranking well in any search engine is desired however the name of the game is how to make money with Google adsense.  For this reason, we concern ourselves with and do things the Google way, and that includes understanding page rank.

As outlined in the make money with adsense Google rules chapter, you should be spending nearly all of your project time developing quality back links.  Any backlink is better then no backlink, but for our purposes a quality backlink means the following:

1. The site back linking to you is in a related niche.  Yes, Google can tell.
2. The anchor text in the back link is a keyword you want to rank for.  You do not want anchor text that says ‘click here’ unless you want your website to rank for those words!
3. The higher the page rank of the website linking to you, the better.

If you want to calculate how many links you will need to overtake your competition, you can decompile their link structure manually or with a tool called SEO Elite.  This tool costs money but does the job nicely.  To do this manually, the best thing to do is go to yahoo.com and type the following into the search box.  linkdomain:domain.com.  This will tell you how many websites are linking to your competitions domain.  You would need to go through each of the links manually and determine their PR value in Google.  Google has a similar tool like Yahoo to check back links, but for whatever reason, Google does not do as good of a job reporting the backlinks.  In a Google search, you would type link:domain.com.  Also, there are plenty of browser plugins that will instantly tell you the page rank of a web page you are visiting, just do a search and then install.

Although we have not reached the chapter detailing on page optimization (how to setup your web pages for seo), you should know that it only represents 10 percent of getting your website to the top of a Google search.  The rest of the work required to make money with adsense is off page optimization, or link building.