Each web page got a beaker glass….

Beaker Glass of Page Ranking

Now also imagine, at the beginning of the www universe, the google spiders a.k.a google-bots (and other spider)  are deployed. Each time they finish reading 1 page, they will give 1 drop of “link juice” (just imaginary liquid for this analogy). Hence, if a web page is very popular, the bot will pass the page over and over again - each time giving the page 1 drop of link-juice.

1 drop each from bot

The result is some website have more juice than the other. Then according to its amount on the scale, the rank is given.

How the spider jumping around from page to page

Now, how the spider or the bots go from one web page to another? The starting point of course if up to the owner of the spider, but the continuation will be up to the content of that page. For example: a bot is deployed on www.cnn.com/index.htm. The bot then do its thing (read the page, indexing, grab the content, etc) and list all the web link (anything pointed with <a href=”"> tag). Then it will go to each one of the link on the list. Remember, each time, giving a drop of link juice after the page is read.

This is where all the fuss about “nofollow” command/attribute. Some link has “nofollow” attribute. When a bot see the attribute, it will remove the link from its “go to” list, hence that link will not be visited nor get any link juice. But not all bot obey thid command/attribute.

Therefore, if you have 1000 web page linking to your web page, then your web page will potentially get that 1000 drop of link juice.. and more….

Additional Juice from every web page….

All expert in SEO world would agree, 10 back links from  web pages with PR5 will be much more valuable than 10 links even 20 links from web pages with PR1. How this can be accomodated in out model above.

Additional juice from higher PR page

For example: your homepage has PR5 and there are 20 link on your page. So, for each of that 20 pages, rather than getting only 1 drop of juice, they will get 6 drop of link juice (1 from the bot, 5 from the home pages).

So, this will explain that a backlink from a higher PR page will be more valuable than the one without PR because they carry more link juice. But it doesn’t mean that the link from PR zero is worthless, no… because you will still get a drop from the bots.

Residual juice…

To make it more complicated, the bots also can do residual carry of the juice. Meaning the link juice from a high PR page can be passed on further down the line but in decresing amount.

For example , let’s go back to your homepage that has PR5 above. It has 20 link, right? One of the 20 is “about us” page. The “about us” page got further 5 links. Say this “about us” page doesn’t have any PR. Then the further 5 links will have 1 drop from the bots, zero from “about us” page plus some residual from homepage, say 4 drops – totaling 5 drops.

Residual Juice from previous page

Therefore, this will explain why web page that indirectly link from high PR website also get advantage of its valuable link juice (thinking about Paul’s or Angela’s back link strategy)

Seamlessly in secret.

Of course , in reality, there are some further altering  of parameters and adjustments. No one really know exactly. But the model above will help you understand pretty much the gist of the link building and link popularity understanding.

Hope this helps….

Google indicates that the speed of your site will be considered as part of the page rank formulation. Website with speedy display will have additional point used for calculate it’s rank.

As usual, there is no exact formula, there is no definite date as when it’s going to be implemented and people is wondering around. But Google gives more definitive clue. As Yahoo has its YSlow extension, Google is now also incorporating similar tools on its webmaster tools complete with massive documentation as an instruction to everybody how to do it right. Explain below is the method to benchmark the performance of your website using mainly Google’s Page Speed tools and Pingdom performance tools. It’s quite simple and will not cost you money to do it. Let’s get started.

Resources

There are 4 main resources that need to be handy on your computer to start optimizing the speed of your website.

1. Account on Google’s Webmaster Tools (Free to signup if you haven’t has one: every serious webmaster need to have one!)
2. Google’s Page Speed extension on Firefox.
   Use your Firefox, login to you Google’s Webmaster Tools, click on your site, and on the left hand Dashboard menu, click the “Site Performance” as picture. Then click the below button.
   
   Page Speed requires “Firebug” to work. If you haven’t installed this just get it here.
3. Online Pingdom Tools , http://tools.pingdom.com/ – Alternatively, you can use “WebPageTest.Org” on http://www.webpagetest.org/. It’s more comprehensive but could be overwhelming and confusing if you are not up to it. Pingdom is good enough – you just want to compare the result before and after optimization unless you want to go deep in this stuffs.
4. Page Speed documentation as your knowledge base in doing the optimization

Method Optimizing Your Website

1. Go to Pingdom Tools : http://tools.pingdom.com/, enter the URL of the homepage of your website and run the test.
2. After test finish, note the total time required to load your website in the “Website Information” on the left bottom corner of the screen
   In this example, it took 9.7 seconds to load 41 object of 585.2KB
3. Now open Firebug (the default: press F12 key), click Page Speed and make sure “Profile Deferrable JavaScript” is active
   (click the arrow and tick the option)
4. Clear the cache of your browser and restart the browser
5. Go to your website but do not login into your website as it may behave differently (sent additional info in cookies, etc). If you are logged in, just logout.
6. Activate / open the firebug again (press f12) and click Page Speed
7. Refresh the display of your website by clicking Refresh button while holding the shift key (to not using cache)
8. Click “Analyze Performance” button on firebug
   
9. The result then will be displayed on screen, something like pictured on the right. In general there will be 3 different marking the green tick, the yellow triangle and red exclamation. Well, start fixing the problem from the reds then yellows. And basically don’t worry about items that already green.
10. Try to work the item one by one with patience. Don’t expect to be able to fix everything within few minutes. Take a good half day or full day to do this optimization. If you are not the technical person, have your technical person be with you when you do this. Otherwise with a bit effort you will find that doing this optimization is a little bit fun.
11. Repeat task (1) to compare the result

This method and tools are the one wake me up that you can really do something to speed up the website. On this actual sample website. I manage to make change the access from 9.7s to only 1.8s or roughly 5x faster.

Waterfall Chart to visualize the loading of all your file

Because of the good result, I actually now can add some functionality on the website to make it even better. If you’re curious, the real website that I did above was http://cookingbyme.com – a start-up cooking niche wordpress blog. After adding the FCG as you can see, the access is still pretty fast (under 4s). No the website is on managed VPS, not dedicated server.

Doing further comparison, it seems that although located on the same server, different website with difference theme and functionality, give me a really different result.

I would suggest to make all your website accessible and displayed around 5 second. The faster the better. Not only it will give you bonus point for the pagerank, but also make your visitor happy and in awe – stand up from the crowd: not only the content and functionality, but the speed as well.

What I really did will be written on several other article on this website as well. Stay tune !