How Many Backlinks Do I Need for a PageRank 2?

This post is part of the Friday Q&A section. If you want to ask a question just send it via the contact form.

OneBlogTips asks:

How many backlinks should I get per day if i want to get PR2 in next PageRank update (approximately 3 months)?

It always amazes me the amount of interest and confusion that Google’s PageRank (both the algorithm and the toolbar number) attracts from webmasters.

The confusion in this question comes from the assumption that all backlinks are equally considered by Google. If this was the case then indeed it would be possible to quantify how many backlinks you need to obtain a (nominal or real) PR1, a PR2, a PR3 and so on.

However, this is not how the PageRank algorithm works.

Suppose there is a link from page A to page B. The amount of “PageRank value” (also called link juice) that this link will pass depends on the PageRank of page A (i.e., the total value coming from the links pointing to page A), divided by the number of outgoing links on Page A.

As you can see, the total number of backlinks your site has only tells half of the story. The PageRank it will have will depend, in turn, on the PageRank of each page that is linking to you (and on the number of outgoing links on each of those pages).

In practical terms this means that getting a few backlinks from very authoritative sites will improve your PageRank much faster then getting hundreds of backlinks from low quality sites.

In fact I have experiences with both situations. I had some sites that I just promoted with links from low quality web directories, and despite having hundreds of backlinks some of these sites never got a PR1. On the other hand I also had a website that had only 10 backlinks and got a PR3 on an update. That’s because one of those links was coming from TechCrunch.

Moral of the story: focus on getting high quality backlinks.