Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Blog

First off, common sense usually goes pretty far. If a page or site links to a bunch of off-topic or low-quality garbage, you can feel safe, assuming the page does not pass link authority. If you have doubts, you probably do not want to link.

Secondly, Google has a toolbar that shows how it currently views a web page or website. The Google toolbar is one of the top search engine optimization tools for a person new to search engine marketing. It works on Windows and is downloadable at http://toolbar.google.com/.

PageRank is a measure of link popularity, which can come and go. It's not hard for a successful business to rent a few high PageRank links into their site and then leverage that link popularity for link exchanges. A site with decent PageRank can get penalized just the same as a site with low PageRank. Usually, you will want to error on the side of caution off the start.

Instead of making PageRank your primary criteria when evaluating a page or site, just think of it as a baseline.

Does Google trust this page? There are several ways in which this question can be answered:

• It ranks for relevant search queries, so that is a good sign.
• It is a useful page, so that is a good sign.
• It is relevant to my site, so that is a good sign.
• It only links to relevant resources, so that is a good sign.

If you are using techniques that fall far outside of Google's recommended guidelines, I would not recommend using their toolbar, since the feedback the toolbar provides may make it easy for them to link you to all of your websites.

In December of 2007 Google edited the toolbar PageRank scores of many sites that were selling links. Most of the sites that had their toolbar PageRank scores edited did not see any change in traffic. The only thing that changed was their perceived PageRank scores.

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