While explaining and demonstrating the importance of Page Rank to a client this morning, the first question they asked was:
“Are there any websites with a Page Rank of 10?”
Initially, I was unsure - I thought Google Search would be ranked quite highly (!) and I knew the BBC website had a page rank of about 9 last time I had looked. After a bit of research, I have found out that there are in fact 5 websites that have a Page Rank of 10 (based on the 31st December 2008). This list was compiled just one day after a Page Rank update in which a number of Page Rank 10 websites dropped to a Page Rank of 9. Google has now switched from monthly Page Rank updates to Quarterly updates, so there should not be another change again now until the end of March.
So here’s the list:
- Google Search
- The W3C CSS Validation Service
- US Goverment website
- Adobe - Adobe Flash Player
- National Portal of India
So as you can imagine, the next question was:
“How do you get a Page Rank of 10?”
Well the short and simple answer is though link building. For a Page Rank of 10 you would need a large quantity of good quality, relevant inbound links to your site. Every link to your site has an associated quality score based on relevance and the quality of the site. Links from .edu and .gov websites are deemed very high quality as these are difficult to obtain, as are links from human edited directories such as DMOZ. As the client currently had a Page Rank of 0, I said it may be some time and a lot of work before their Page Rank increases. Google will notice sudden spikes in the amount of links to your site if your purchase links or automatically sign up to 100’s of directories. The best way to naturally increase the quantity and quality of links to your site is through article submission.
