WDTalk

In the last week, I’ve read a number of threads discussing Page Rank – most noticeably how it affects SERPS or back links.  To optimize your back links, measure the relevance of the content of the source page of that link to the content on your landing page. The more relevant, the more weight given that back link.

To determine Page Rank - which of the following are easier to grasp?

PR(A) = (1 – d) + d * SUM ((PR(I->A)/C(I))

Where:

* PR(A) is the PageRank of your page A.
* d is the damping factor, usually set to 0,85.
* PR(I->A) is the PageRank of page I containing a link to page A.
* C(I) is the number of links off page I.
* PR(I->A)/C(I) is a PR-value page A receives from page I.
* SUM (PR(I->A)/C(I)) is the sum of all PR-values page A receives from pages with links to page A..

Versus

PR is a purely mechanistic calculation of the probability of a resource being randomly requested, defined by the following expression.

 

 

where:

• p1,p2,…,pN are the pages under consideration;
• M(pi) is the set of pages that link to pi;
• L(pj) is the number of outbound links on page pj;
• d is the damping factor; and,
• N is the total number of pages.

Does PageRank matter? More than a few self proclaimed SEO experts say NO, but common sense dictates that it does, even though some low PageRank (PR) sites with just the correct combination of keywords outperform higher PR sites in Search Engine Results Pages (SERPS). When we externally compare sites for PageRank, we’re comparing Toolbar PageRank which doesn’t necessarily match Google’s internal page rank.

Toolbar PageRank versus Real Page Rank
What’s reflected on Google’s Tool Bar is a simple indicator for some of Google’s vast tool chest of variables that determine real page rank. The two may be very different. It’s believed that Google looks at over 200 key indicators, and the combination of those determine real page rank. Toolbar PageRank is believed to be a numeric value of link juice, or the measurement of indexed links to your site.

Inbound links from higher PR sites that have related content lend higher value than those with higher PR with non-related content or lots of links to bad neighborhoods. Changes in PR do not always affect changes in SERPS. Toolbar PageRank is essentially an algorithm to quantify the authority of a site, and the assigned numerical number (0-10) cannot be increased without increasing backlinks.

How do you determine your site’s value to the search engines?
One of the things I look for is how often search engines spider pages, but that’s just a starting point. If you’re running a popular forum or blog, content on your site is being constantly updated, and the search engines sit up and take note of this. If you’re using Google Alerts, it’s not uncommon to see threads indexed in less than five minutes.

Another way is to analyze traffic to your site, researching the keywords, keyword phrases and extended keyword phrases being entered in search queries and on what pages they land.

Are all search engines equal?
The answer here is absolutely NOT. Although they all factor in backlinks, Yahoo, for instance seems to factor out low page rank sites. Google, on the other hand, clearly seems to use a variety of different algorithms to rank sites. As a test, do a search on both search engines for the same query, then take a look at the descending order of PageRank in the SERPS for each.

The Value of Niche Marketing
Here’s where it gets interesting. The more niche the search query is, the greater the probability that lower PR pages may outperform higher PR pages. And vice versa – the more generic the query, the greater the probability higher PR pages may outperform lower PR pages. An example, a query for the niche – Business Class Shared Web Hosting, may rank in the top ten in Google SERPS, with a corresponding PageRank of 4. A search query for Hosting will likely return higher PR sites in the top ten.

My Recommendation
Don’t become overly absorbed by the Toolbar PageRank of your site. While it is certainly an indicator of link juice, it’s not an accurate indicator of SERPS value, and that’s what really matters. Will prospects entering search queries relevant to your products or services find your site on the first page of results in Google, Bing or Yahoo? If not, it doesn’t matter if your PageRank is 10. If they can’t find your site within minutes of entering that search query, you’ll be like that airport they build near me years ago that no one ever used, yet the bus lines kept driving routes by it – nice facility, but no revenue. Instead of investing in PageRank, invest in providing value to your visitors. Your SERPS will improve and so will your bottom line.

PageRank has been a hotly debated topic in SEO communities lately, primarily because Google had earlier advocated PageRank sculpting using the nofollow tag, but this June, Google reversed course. Google’s Matt Cutts posted that Google had actually changed its algorithms over a year ago. The kicker is that the nofollow attribute is apparently still counted toward how PageRank is apportioned among all links on a page. So nofollow doesn’t mean those links don’t count.

From what I’ve gathered so far, my perception is that Google’s algorithms decide how much PageRank is assigned to each and every link on a specific page, meaning the more links on a page, the less PageRank each link gets. Of course, some links may not deserve credit and receive a PageRank of zero.

On to the nofollow attribute
Whereas, the SEO community used sculpting strategies to alter how PageRank was divvied up, giving more PageRank to specific pages, now the use of nofollow restricts or prevents other links from gaining any PageRank that Google once had given them.

The confusion
Enter the conspiracy theories. Google generated a lot of confusion by delaying acknowledging they had changed their algorithms – a year earlier, when they themselves advocated sculpting in the first place. Does this mean that sites that were sculpted were penalized without knowledge, or did anything, in fact, change at all?

What Matt Cutts says about PageRank Sculpting
“I would say that it’s not the first thing I would work on. I would work on getting more links, having higher quality content, those are always the sorts of things that you want to do first. But then if you have a certain amount of budgeted PageRank, you certainly can sculpt your PageRank. I wouldn’t necessarily do it with the nofollow tag …. but a better more effective form of PageRank sculpting is choosing, for example, which things to link to from your home page.”

My recommendation
Again, this boils down to providing value to the end user, providing higher quality content and linking to relevant pages and sites. It really is as simple as when a prospect searches for a keyword or keyword phrase, the major search engines are structuring their algorithms to display results that are meaningfully relevant, without duplication. The goal should be to attract prospects to your site, keep them there to expose them to your brand, products and services, then convert them to clients.

From Wikipedia

PageRank is a link analysis algorithm used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references.

Is PageRank important to SEO efforts? The relevance of PageRank is a hotly debated topic on many forums with a lot of SEO experts downplaying its importance. At issue to me is – will better PageRank results help improve my bottom line, either directly or indirectly?

Below is a calculator for measuring PageRank.

What most SEO expeerts do agree on is that the importance of sites linked to your site, in turn, raise or lower your PageRank.  So if you’re backlinked from a site with a PageRank of 8, that’ll carry more weight than having a backlink from a site with a PageRank of 0 (and there are plenty of those).