We have a few web properties with surprisingly high Google PageRank for the homepages. Ever since I discovered the high rankings, I am trying to figure out what might have triggered them. Besides bragging about it, I try to provide some details on the metrics; some may help you in your own SEO strategies.
http://listings.realbird.com - PageRank 3
This is a listing browser site which shows all the RealBird single property websites. Google's index has ~50,000 pages from this URL and it has a hierarchical internal link structure, which makes the internal link count very high. It is also linked from the sidebar of our ActiveRain blog, which seems to count as a distinct backward link on all of our AR posts (according to Google Webmaster Tools). Other than the unusually large number of pages in the index and the ongoing fresh content, I don't see other serious 3rd party links, which would justify PR3. Even more surprising is that over 90% of the 4,000 plus unique visitors per month arrive through search engine queries.
Theory: In the Listing Browser website's case, most likely the 1) careful content and internal linking design, 2) the unusually many distinct pages 3) with constantly updating fresh content does the trick.
http://www.WhatOneMillionBuys.com - PageRank 4
It is our pet blog. We are nowhere close to where we want to get this site to, but it already attracts thousands of visitors per month from all over the world. Currently it lists million dollar sales: homes through RealBird, luxury cars, jewelry and fine art deals etc.. We do have some good backward links and we always make sure to submit every post to as many social bookmarking sites as possible. We also utilize the "All in one SEO pack" plugin, which is a very good search engine optimization tool for self-hosted Wordpress blogs. It's a must have in my opinion.
Theory: 1) SEO 2) 700+ pages in Google's primary index already 3) some high quality backward links from prominent sites 4) many outgoing links (!)
http://activerain.com/blogs/realbird - PageRank 2
I swear it was PR 3 when I started to write this blog a few days ago :) Anyways, PR 2 is quite impressive and I think that it's due to AR internal link structure and that Google considers them as distinct human links, rather than standard navigations. We also had a few hits (Google Street View integration, Warrent Buffet post etc) which resulted in some valuable backward links. But I could not found any significant reason why we have PR 2, when other, more prominent bloggers on AR has lower or none on their AR blog homepage.
Theory: Hmm. Not sure in this case. One thing for sure: don't forget to use the AR sidebar links feature. Link to your website, other blogs, single property websites. Google seems to count them as distinct links from distinct pages.
http://www.mybloglog.com/buzz/members/RealBird/ - PageRank 3
This is our buzz (aka lifestream) page on MyBlogLog. It has again a surprisingly good PageRank and more interestingly better than some heavy blogger. Just like in the previous examples, we have a very active buzz page because we feed it with all the RealBird listings and all the blogs we author. Furthermore, we have many contacts and their updates are also streamed here. I noticed through Google Alerts that Google started to index these buzz pages recently.
There are some common metrics which seem to be consistent across all of these surprisingly highly ranked pages. All 4 web properties have a lot of distinct pages known by Google (in Google's primary index). They are also well linked to each other internally and have plenty outgoing links. Furthermore, and this seems to be even more convincing, all have frequent updates. Just like with ActiveRain itself, once Google notices many fresh content coming from a particular source, Google starts paying more attention. I have no idea how this translates into PageRank, nor do I know what value PageRank has in terms of absolute metrics, but frequent updates (e.g. blogs with ongoing content) seem to rank better nowadays.
I'd like to see other high ranking pages on ActiveRain. (You can check the PageRank of any page using the Google Toolbar. You will have to explicitly enable the PageRank feature either during the setup or through the Google Toolbar "Settings>Options" under the "More" menu.)
If you have a ranked AR post or homepage please post it as a comment following the syntax, that I used above:
Url (feel free to link it) and add the current PageRank after it.
Please post only 1) ActiveRain links and 2) only those which belongs to you: Your profile page, your AR blog homepage or a particular AR blog post you authored.
-- Zoltan
RealBird.com
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About how long did it take for you to see results like that? I am just curious for a time frame.