Can Articles Affect Your PageRank?
Due to Google’s recent PageRank update, some people might feel like bench warmers because they saw their PageRank fall. If you found yourself in this situation you might find it useful to know that articles can boost your PageRank. So you can actually prepare for the next PageRank update by implementing your article marketing strategy right now.
Articles affect PageRank in two important ways. First, a little about what PageRank is:
Google instituted PageRank in 1988 to measure website trust. Based on Google’s philosophy of linking, which said that website owners link to other websites because they like them and trust them, Google decided to make inbound link quality a major factor in determining PageRank. But they also look at on-page factors as well. If your outbound links and internal links are relevant and not broken then you build trust for your PageRank score as well.
So what are the two ways that articles build trust? By providing website owners a way to build quality inbound links to their website and by giving website owners useful content to put on their websites that will build trust.
Here’s how it works: You write an article and submit it to several article directories. Those article directories are not your primary target. You want publishers related to your niche to pick up your article and publish it - on their website, their blog, in their newsletter, and wherever you might find targeted traffic related to your niche. Every time one of these related website owners or publishers uses your article you get an inbound link from a relevant website. That is a trust building factor.
If you put your articles on your own website then you also encourage people to link to you because if your article is worthy anything - that is, it provides valuable content - then people related to your website will want to link to it. That’s another trust building factor.
Thirdly, your article content itself is useful in building trust among your target audience.
Article marketing works. It drives traffic, builds trust for your website, and can be used to increase your PageRank. All it takes is a little hard work, a good strategy, and the drive to pursue it.
