In cyberspace all websites start out equal. No matter how great you may think your site is, trust me when I say, it’s not. They all start off as mealiness wastes of space … a big whopping zero. It’s nothing personal. It’s just a fact. A new site has no “authority”. But that’s okay. In time that will change the more that changes, and the more authority your site builds up, the more valuable your website becomes. Don’t get me wrong, it’s totally possible for a new site to come out of the gate and make some money and maybe even rank for a keyword or two but in the end trust me when I say, don’t let that confuse you. All new websites, no matter what, start out with no authority and in the big picture that means you are a big fat zero. At least in terms of SEO.
But like I said before, in time this changes. In fact, with just time itself that changes. There is a metric known as domain age and the older your domain is, the more authority you are given. So basically just because your site has been around awhile, you are automatically given a certain level of respect or “authority”. The longer your site has been around, the more aged it becomes and the more of an aged bonus you get.
Then one day say someone tweets about your website or posts on their facebook page about it. Maybe their pin one of your pictures on pinterest or reblog you on tumblr. Whatever it doesn’t matter. It’s all basically the same and now you are getting social and this gives you some street cred. The more social networking sites that are pushing your site, the more social bonus you get and this in turn gives your site the street cred or social media authority bonus.
Now keep in mind with each of these factors, one single thing alone won’t do anything for you. It’s all a part of a big pie. Each bonus or metric can only do so much for you, even if you have the max possible bonus for that given thing, it still only possible to get so much. Say in all the whole pie is worth 100 and domain age is worth 10 and social networking is worth 10. So let’s say in your pie you have 3 points for domain age, and 10 points for social networking, your site is still only worth 13 points. No matter how popular your site may be with social networks, that bonus still won’t ever go beyond 10 points.
Of course all that traffic from social media will bring you other things, like more traffic and that’s always a good thing but in terms of domain authority or SEO bonuses, there is a max cap. Now that the common folk are talking about your site in social media you have the mainstream media or the big boys who mention your site by now in reference. They don’t even have to link to you, but well a link is always great but in this one particular case it’s called the media citation metric.
For example, say you are at a website that talks about some hot new car. Now say how it mentions that car got a 5+ rating in consumer reports. That’s a media citation and some sites get mentioned like that more often than others and it is those sites who get the media citation bonus. Another example of a media citation in our industry is AVN. Every time another website mentions that a movie got a (whatever) star rating from AVN. That counts as a media citation and plays into how much of a media citation bonus AVN.com gets. The more often AVN is cited in other media as a reference, then the bigger that bonus is. Another case in point … Fame Registry. This site ranks the popularity of porn stars each month. Every time someone issues a press release that says so and so is in the top 100 or top 10 at Fame Registry or won the whatever award for Fame Registry, that is a media citation and gives that site a SEO bonus. This is a fairly new metric so nobody can really say for sure how much of a bonus it gives those sites but some initial results seem to be rather promising as it being a big bonus.
Next there is the friends and family bonus. Well that’s what I call it. 🙂 But really it’s the bonus that matters to almost everyone else as it is the most common one out there.
If you have a website and someone else links to your website, you get a bonus. The more people that link to you, the more of a bonus you get. The more authority that website has that is linking to you, will directly effect how much of a bonus you get. There is no way to know for sure as Google doesn’t publish its trade secrets but through testing some people have been able to guesstimate that a single PR3 link is worth more than 20 PR1 links. And a link from a site with a page rank of 5 … well as you can imagine is far more valuable than all of those combined, plus some.
Once you get your site into the PR4 or higher range, you are doing great and have really proven yourself to matter to Google and to ad buyers who all of the sudden will start knocking on your door to buy ad space from you.