SEO 101 is back in full force this New Year!

PageRank is a system which has been a part of SEO since Google was brought out in 1998. Google has explained that at the centre of their software is PageRank, a system developed by Larry Pageand Sergey Brin at Stanford University, both founders of the search engine giant. Google explains PageRank as follows:

‘PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”. Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.’

Google is saying that PageRank is determined by the amount of and type of pages linking to your site and this is an indicator in it’s ranking. Google also considers the pages which link to your site when matching your page up with a potential visitors query, this means that the pages who link to you should ideally be relevant to your site. [ For a basic overview of Link Building read our earlier post 'What On Earth Is Link Building!?!'.]

Not only do the links contribute to PageRank and therefore rankings, so does the anchor text used. If you are wanting to boost your ranking for ‘t-shirts’ but use the anchor text ‘brandname’ then your PageRank may increase if you obtain links from sites with a high PageRank but it will not help your ranking for ‘t-shirts’. It is therefore not only important to consider how many links you have and who they come from but also what anchor text is being used and if it benefits your website.

Google PageRank

Google Page Rank Bar Showed By Arrow

PageRank is constantly being updated or at least it is internally, but what Google let’s us see is ‘toolbar’ PageRank which is a snap-shot of the site’s PageRank every few months (you can see a screen-shot above detailing it).  It is important not to get bogged down with PageRank as the reason Google doesn’t update it publicly regularly is because they don’t wnat you to focus on just that and ignore the other important factors when it comes to ranking. Unfortunately many SEO’s decided that PageRank was the most important factor in SEO when it first came out and Google may have inadvertantly made that seem the case by saying:

‘And while we have dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of Google on a daily basis, PageRank continues to play a central role in many or our web search tools.’

SEO’s tend to emphasis the last part of that sentence and forget completely about the beginning, yes, PR may play a central role in Google’s search tools but the fact is, Google is constantly updating it’s ranking systems to get better and better results and that means that there are going to be plenty of other factors to consider when trying to get a website to rank higher than just PageRank! That’s not to say it’s not important — it is, but Google alone has upwards of 200 factors we KNOW about to consider as well as PageRank.

When thinking about PageRank, the important parts to consider and remember are:

  • High PageRank does NOT guarantee high search rankings
  • How many links / How high is your site’s PageRank?
  • Do you have high-quality sites (links) linking to your site?
  • Does the anchor-text used benefit your site?
  • PageRank is one of many factors used when determining rank results.