Article Submission Review

What is the Significance of PageRank?

0

A Little Background

PageRank is a Google developed mathematical evaluation of the relative importance of a given page across the spectrum of the entire Internet. Many people mistakenly think that PageRank is calculated at a domain or site level, but indeed, as the name implies, it is a page level ranking. Each and every page on your site will have it’s own PageRank value. It was originally developed by Google to use for their searching algorithm and it still is, but other factors over time have become more important than just the numerical pagerank.

Pagerank varies from PR n/a to PR10 – the highest possible value. There are just a handful of PR10 sites on the Internet – Google.com and Facebook.com being two such examples (though there are more). But just to give you an idea, even Twitter.com and Adobe.com are only PR9 (at the time of writing of this post). FYI, for a good bit of background on Google Pagerank, go straight to the source – Google Technology Overview.

A page would be given a high PageRank value based on the quality and number of links pointing into that page. You can think of PR as water that flows throughout your site and throughout the web as a whole. If you think about it for your site, you can imagine pouring water (PR) on the homepage of you site and it flowing out through every link it finds on the page – both internally within your site and externally off your site.

In the early days of PageRank, it was common practice by SEO elites to use PageRank sculpting to shape the PageRank of their site. If you think about the water metaphor again you can then logically extend that to the concept of stopping up the leaks and directing the flow where you want it to go. You could do this via creative design, use of NoFollow and DoFollw links as well as use of JavaScript links to hide links from the crawler. This was commonly referred to as pagerank sculpting, and though it can still be done today, it is far less utilized and practiced as PageRank itself has become less valued and less important in the rankings than it used to be.

Gaming PageRank

PageRank while technically still the same, is used differently today than it used to be. But before we can talk about today, you need to understand the history of what has happened. PageRank is a mathematical formula and as more and more SEO elites began to fully understand it and how it could influence their sites, they began to aggressively game the system. PageRank sculpting was used to catapult their site pagerank and it because a commodity on the Internet – traded, sold and bartered. Even today, the influence of PageRank is still an important factor as is people’s desire to acquire high PR links.

The fact is that PR is numerical and simple to understand – PR5 is better than PR2 and thus a PR5 link must have more value than a PR2 link. Though the formula is supremely complex, the end result is a simple numerical value from 0 to 10 (as well as N/A) and that simplicity is what has made it so popular. A simple toolbar can show you the PR of a page easily and quickly – it became something that people could grasp and they focused on it.

Global PageRank updates used to be about every three or four months and an entire marketplace grew up around these public toolbar updates. People would buy sites, pump up their page rank than then dump (sell) them quickly for a profit based on achieved PageRank. Links were bartered and sold based on their PageRank (and still are), etc…

So, where are we today?

Well the more things change the more things stay the same. Google has moved away from the importance of PageRank in the SERPS, but it is still a factor – it’s just one of many factors. There are many people out there that will tell you that PageRank doesn’t mean anything anymore. Let me assure you that they are way off base. We do continuous testing and evaluation of linkbuilding efforts and strong PR links are still very effective today.

Where PR is less important is for the actual ranking of your site/page in the SERPS. A lower PR site can get onto page #1 and outrank a higher PR site – it happens all of the time. But keep in mind that PR is still an indicator – and an important one – of authority and that authority has a lot to do with the rankings. The real issue is that PR is completely transparent (well, it appears to be) because of the simple numerical value assigned and so people use it a lot because they can get their heads around it. Authority is a nebulous term and so it’s much harder to define or quantify. But the fact is, Google wants it that way.

Too many people have been manipulating Google with high PR sites and links for a long time now and so they have purposely made it more difficult and confusing. First off, Google no longer does quarterly PR public updates. They went many, many months without updating PR and then when they did, they began doing it in a revision cycle that no one has really figured out now – just the way they want it.

You’ll still see PageRank being updated and changing, but there doesn’t seem to be a rhyme or reason to it now and it is seemingly continuously updating small sections rather than in the past where you would see Internet wide PR changes. Because of this continual process of much fewer sites being affected at once, it largely goes unnoticed. But we have scripts in place testing PR on our own network of sites and we see almost weekly fluctuation, so don’t think that things aren’t changing.

PageRank False Assumptions

There are some very common misconceptions about page rank. The first is that it is very slow to change. This is completely inaccurate. PageRank is simply a mathematical formula (albeit a very complex one) and as such can be calculated instantaneously at any point in time. Mike and I have witnessed a brand new page on a news site become a PR3 page in a matter of minutes. So don’t be lulled into thinking that it doesn’t matter or that Google isn’t really paying attention.

The facts are that PageRank is continually being updated but we just aren’t made privy to those updates very frequently. It is our firm belief that there is the concept of an internal pagerank that Google uses internally for its own purposes but just doesn’t disclose to the public very frequently. At some point they push that internal pagerank out and publish it and it begins to show up on toolbar pagerank utilities and such. No one knows this for sure, but I would speculate that it’s almost a guarantee. Google has gone through great strides to reduce the gaming of the system via PageRank and I’m sure they are purposely giving us out-of-date information at this point.

So Where Does that Leave Us?

We still believe that PageRank is valuable and important, but that it just needs to be looked at with long term perspective in mind. Rather than focusing on it, it is just a byproduct of the process. But it is a strong indication of authority that is for sure. And when PageRank is (finally) made public for a site you can infer what’s going on with your site authority based on it rising or falling. If your site abruptly falls from PR4 to PR2, for example, that’s a sign that there are issues and it is something you need to pay attention to. We do not fall into that camp that says it doesn’t matter. We strongly disagree with that and see evidence all on a daily basis that strong PR links still matter. Likewise, a rise in PR can usually denote an increase in authority as well.

We suggest that you not focus on the PageRank of your site or trying to sculpt it at this point but rather that you simply use it as one more factor in evaluation of the strength or authority of your site. Furthermore, anything less than six months for site age is probably not even worth looking at the PageRank as it won’t tell you much. After about a year of site age you will likely see the PageRank begin to stabilize for your site unless you are doing odd or blatant linkbuilding without following common sense.

PageRank does, however, still play an important role in link building strategies and strong PR links still have more influence and impact on site rankings than lower PR weaker links. We don’t see that going away anytime soon either. But keep in mind our philosophy of keeping it natural. You can’t just rely on high PR links and you can’t just rely on tons of low quality links either – you need a mix of both. In the quality versus quantity debate remember the correct answer is (c) all of the above.

 

• Share

Tags: does page rank matter anymore, is google pagerank dead, understanding google page rank, why pagerank is still important