What is “Google Juice,” or Page Authority, and Why Is It Important?
What is “Google Juice,” or Page Authority, and Why Is It Important?
Danny Shepherd, Co-CEO • Intero Digital • February 23, 2018
What is Page Authority?
As you work toward optimizing your website for search engines, there are a variety of factors that impact where you will appear in the search results. One of them is your page authority, or what Google has termed PageRank™. This algorithm is an attempt to figure out how authoritative your page is, based on who trusts it enough to reference it as part of their website. After all, one major way that websites are connected is through hyperlinks to other web pages. Search engines can detect who is linking to your website, and they can use that information to note that other people see you as influential, relevant, and authoritative.
Page Authority is only one of the two major things that influence your rankings: relevance is the more commonly known one, which has to do with the keywords you use. Page Authority, however, is independent of keywords: your page authority is a level that applies to all potential keywords!
How Does Page Authority Work?
Page Authority algorithms do change, but the basic formula for your page’s influence is based on two factors:
- How many other sites and pages are linking back to your site?
- How influential are those sites?
So, for instance, if your personal blog hyperlinks back to your business web page, you get “credit” for having a link, but if no other websites are linking to your personal blog, it won’t be a lot of credit. This formula helps to eliminate a few things that people can do to “game” the system: you cannot simply create a bunch of separate sites just to link to your own website, because it is important that the other sites are also authoritative. This ranking is meant to organically evaluate the benefits of your site’s content, as well as how much other people feel influenced by your information. Luckily, that doesn’t mean that you have to sit back and just wait for your PageRank to rise!
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3 Great Ways to Build Your Page Authority
1. Link Back to Authoritative Sites That Influence You
One of the ways to first start ‘paying it forward’ is to use relevant external and internal links in your own content. External links help you build connections to high-influence sites, and they establish your authority for those who are reading your content. Your internal links are also helpful: while they don’t make you more influential, necessarily, they make it easier for both visitors and search engine crawlers to move through your website. It allows you to more clearly direct people to the pages that you want to rank highly and be influential!
2. Guest Post and Send Your Content to Influencers Who Can Benefit From It
You cannot be sure that people will want to use your content in their own website design, but if you create valuable resources related to your industry, it cannot hurt to share these things with the owners of the websites on your “linking wish list!” If you also respect their content, you can propose a mutual benefit of citing their information in your content as well. These are forms of gaming the system, but if you are truly interested in their content, it is an authentic connection. Another way to create these external links is to “guest post” – in your capacity as part of your own company, write a piece of content for a popular online publication or an influential blog. These opportunities allow you to access the audience of that site, as well as getting a high-ranking site to link back to yours.
3. Share and Promote Your Content
Excellent content deserves to be shared! By using digital marketing services to get your content out there in the world through social media, PPC advertising, and more, you can get more people to encounter your content and cite it in their own content. To learn more, read about SEO services on our website or contact us for a free evaluation.
