+Joshua Berg has written up some brilliant education about combining Google+, Google Authorship, and Google PageRank. He's got three posts in the series:

Pt 1: Is Google+ Page Rank the culprit behind the current … http://goo.gl/R4TZM

Pt 2: How PageRank in Google+ is Earned. Link Myths Busted!
http://goo.gl/0YcDp

His writing is brilliant and to be honest he is much better at explaining the concepts than I am. When people ask my my 'secrets' I'm just going to point them here from now on!

#blog  

Reshared post from +Joshua Berg

Why PageRank in G+ Matters To You & Your Connections
?????????????????????????????
Part 3, of my Google+ PageRank (G+PR) series.
If new to this series, I suggest catching up on Pt 1 & 2 (bottom).
?????????????????????????????
If you find this article exceptionally informative, please share it.
I'm going to explain how that will help your G+ PageRank improve, along with the Googlers you regularly connect with together.
?????????????????????????????
I'd like to start with a few disclaimers here…
Some of the the ideas I put forward are just that, they're not written in stone & I welcome opposing opinions for discussion. If at anytime I'm not wearing any clothes, I'd like to know about it.
Other things I reference (ie. PR) are facts commonly known amongst SEO experts, on which I may not expound sufficiently for want of space, as I'm trying to cover less commonly covered territory here.
?????????????????????????????

Interest in this topic has been high & I believe knowledge of this topic may even change the way many people use G+ for the better. Firstly by encouraging people to post shareable higher quality content & engaging with those who do. Second, to understand the value of engaging more with ranking G+ experts within your field of interest.

That said, this topic is not for everyone, If, for example…
-you're not interested in higher search engine ranking, or SEO…
-not concerned with rapidly increasing your sphere of influence…
-you're just here looking for your soul mate & kinda Facebook'n it…
Then you should probably skip this topic & uncircle me too. LOL.

Your Questions On G+ PageRank Answered
?????????????????????????????
I had actually intended to cover some more technical aspects of G+PR statistical analysis today. However I've ended up talking much more about the practical side for average users, with some specific questions & answers. So this is kind of an in-between post to help bring the topic home to more users.

G+PR is interesting, but does it matter to average people?

    Well, I think it matters, but not for the purpose of learning how to game the system. It matters because I believe G+PR is & will become more so, a very good indicator of the quality of people, pages & communities you engage with here.

    I predict that G+PR will soon be more easily viewable on your PR Toolbar once G+ resolves the cannonical issues they've had. Then you'll be able to instantly see the quality of profiles you're engaging with. Users can hide their followers & following, but they can't hide their G+PR. While many average Googlers do not yet have a PageRank, soon enough all of the ones who've been engaging well enough will.
    
    It also matters if you're like many who heard that joining G+ and putting up lots of posts, will really help your websites to get higher rankings in the search engines. Posting to yourself on G+ (as many are) will not do anything for your SEO, or SERPs. I've been seeing this more and more every day.

Does G+PR matter a lot in affecting Google search rankings?

    In my opinion it makes a world of difference, as PageRank has always been a predominant factor (arguably) in search engine ranking positions (SERP). And now the PR from G+ appears to be playing an even more important roll. We already see many clear examples of this & it is why many high PR authors in G+ consistently outrank most other users sharing the same users post, or content (at least for a period of time).

Would dropping G+ tags to my pages in everyone's comments be a good strategy, as you said comment tags are followed?

    This is something people have actually been asking about, or coming to conclusions on since I started these posts & is not the kind of quality engagements I'm promoting.

    Chances are this would be far more annoying than useful as it looks spammy & doing so would lose you more reputable friends then you'd gain. Since PR on any post would presumably be distributed the same as traditionally on a web page, that means links distributed further down in comments would not have nearly the value, as those above in the post. More importantly, the comments are not shared with the posts, so there's no continued effect.

    I would also say it's not known, or definitive, how G+ will credit comment tags on the back end, or if they even do. You can however expect them to become "nofollow" pretty quick, if users get too spammy with them.

How about using tags to my business page in my posts?

    Using tags (strategically) in posts like this (+HousesFast) to one of my pages, "might" be a good idea, because it will receive G+PR (including more with each share). However, we would also want to consider the relevance, or irrelevance of the context.

    While this tactic probably improves a page's G+PR, this particular post is not relative to the page topic, so the post itself would not be a relevant contributor to the page's market in SERP. I believe some experimenting by interested SEO experts might shed more light on this, or give context to strategies.

The important thing I am trying to encourage is improving quality & therefore interest of your content. You can't beat that!

    If nobody engages with, or shares your content. Then you're likely just wasting your time & bleeding out your own G+PR.

    Also, passing link juice back & forth, between your own profile & your own business page is quite purposeless, but seems to be a strategy of many.

Can you give an example of high G+PR outranking lower in SERPs?

    As a latecomer to G+, I find my own posts often outranked by higher G+PR authors, who are either sharing my posts, or writing about them. As an example, for searches on "PageRank Google+", or "Google+ PageRank" I was easily outranked by the following (among others):

+Mark Traphagen PR5 "How PageRank in Google+…" (share)
+Max Huijgen PR4 "Is Google+ Page Rank the culp…" (about)
+Gideon Rosenblatt PR5 "Page Rank for individuals…" (about)
+Ronnie Bincer PR5 (also a share)
My own post was even outranked by my share in the
Google Authorship & AuthorRank community that has a PR3.
G+PR in communities is a game changer, more on this soon.

    So all of the above posts outranking mine in Google SERP, either included direct shares of my own post, or were about & referencing my posts on this topic. That said, another possible scenario happening is, as Google spiders more of this content & realizes most of these high ranked authors are linking to my original post, those rankings will balance out more evenly. The main thing that I'm seeing though is, these high ranked authors (at least on the short term) will quickly outrank others on their own topics, but the metrics tend to change as the freshness cools.

Is there a difference to G+PR, website PR & traditional PR?

    The short answer is, no. When I refer to G+PR, I'm not inferring that it's an entirely different system from website PR. I'm really just talking about the PageRank that's currently ranking in Google+, how that is passed around & earned.

     A bigger question that could be tested, but is not necessarily known as fact, is whether Google is giving preference to G+PR (the PR coming from your G+ profiles) over other equal PR on the wider web. Indications are, that they are. This has at least been tested & written about comparing social media sites such as FB with G+ posts.

How can I get my G+PR to flow into PageRank for my website?

    There are 2 main ways this can be done. One is when you use embedded links within your posts, either public, or to communities. Look for communities to start changing their guidelines as more moderators become aware of what we'll be discussing regarding quality posts vs. link dropping.

    The second is when you include quality keyword relevant links from your business page, or profile, in your About & Links sections, which have accumulated good PR due to following some of the practices you've been learning about here.

Special note: Notice G+ has a unique tag on the Contributor to section of your profile "contributor-to nofollow". That means presumably you are not passing link juice through your contributor to section to your site.
[Edit: In fact your Authorship tag, on the other end of this link, is more likely contributing PR back to your business page. ]

Teaching Connections To Improve Quality Improves Yours.
?????????????????????????????

? Now I promised to tell you why you'll want to both share this & continue to encourage your own friends & circles in G+ to improve their quality of posts, engagements & spheres of influence.

An important and established fact of PageRank is, that it's a link based hierarchical system, where the higher PR gives many times the rank power through to their links than lower PR pages. The image of this post contains a chart that shows how many links are needed from what level of PR to reach your target PR. As you can see, higher PR links give much greater link juice per link, than lower PR links.

Wikipedia explains it like this:
PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page.
The rank value indicates an importance of a particular page. A hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of support. The PageRank of a page is defined recursively and depends on the number and PageRank metric of all pages that link to it ("incoming links"). A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PageRank has good continued reading on this topic.

Let's take a look at User A and User B…
By this time you know that link juice is given & received, but did you know it also bleeds? In fact these are basic principles of PageRank.

? User A:
?????????????????????????????
Posts quality content, engages with friends often, reciprocates with sharing & tagging their friends often. But they have also have a lot of "friends" (Googlers) who…

? Have no idea what their doing in G+, so post everything random.
? Who add & circle every miscellaneous circle they can find.
? Post uninteresting topics, news stories & daily mortgage rates.
? These friends circle & engage with lots of other spammy users who also don't know what they're doing, post lots of junk & link dropping.

After a year of using G+ daily, User A can't figure out why their G+PR is still 0 & their business page & websites aren't ranking in search. User A, became victim of bleeding G+PR through a vast network of low quality connections, that drained it, with spam links & tagging.

? User B:
?????????????????????????????
Posts quality content, engages with friends often, reciprocates with sharing & tagging their friends often. They have connected with lots of friends who…

? Understand these principles that it's quality, not quantity that matters & they teach other friends in their circles to the same.
? Who look for and circle relative & knowledgeable Googlers.
? Post lots of high quality, interesting & engaging topics.
? These friends have also learned to seek out, engage with & reciprocate with experts on G+ in their field of interest.

After a year of using G+ daily, User B probably has up to PR 3. And is amazed at how much their pages & website rankings have increased in search. The biggest cause of this was, because all of their friends had learned about quality engagement & spheres of influence & had all increased their G+PR as well.

?????????????????????????????

On the highest end of the spectrum, my new friend +Euro Maestro is a good example of this. He has found a way to consistently engage with the most popular people on G+, as a product of their being popular they also have the highest G+PR.

The result? With just 45,000 followers, he has managed to rank an enviable PR6, claimed by only a small group of Googlers, of which these are a few (alphabetically)…

Danny Sullivan PR6, 1.7 million.
Guy Kawasaki PR6, 4 million.
Jamie Oliver PR6, 1.3 million.
Larry Page PR6, 5.2 million.
Robert Scoble PR6, 3.3 million.
Sarah Hill PR6, 2.6 million.
Vic Gundotra PR6, 4 million.

You experienced G+ experts here know what I'm talking about. Many of you have also engaged personally & regularly with these users.

Well, I hope you've gotten enough valuable information out of reading this topic & if you're a little new & maybe don't understand it all, the thing I believe you will get & should learn from this are the examples of User A & User B.

Now there's a lot more on this which I haven't gotten to yet & I'm sure there's things I've missed, or forgetting, so I hope to explain more of it soon. For those of you who came new to this topic, you should read:

Pt 1: Is Google+ Page Rank the culprit behind the current … http://goo.gl/R4TZM

Pt 2: How PageRank in Google+ is Earned. Link Myths Busted!
http://goo.gl/0YcDp

#pagerank #googlepagerank #pagerankupdate #Gplusseo #seotips #googleplusseo

Google+: Reshared 15 times
Google+: View post on Google+