There are those in our industry who will tell you that PageRank
is dead. I’ve been reading a lot lately about how we are
supposed to ignore the green bar in our browser but you know
what? I disagree and I’m going to tell you why.
For those who don’t know, PageRank is Google’s way of
determining a website’s worth based on the number of incoming
links it has. In other words, Google counts the number of links
pointing to a site as votes, generally speaking the more votes a
site has the more it is likely worth to Google.
While this is a simplistic view of PageRank and it has indeed
gotten much more complex than this, in essence this is what
PageRank is. So why would many reckon it’s not worth anything?
Because at one time, Google’s ranking algorithms were based in
large part on the PageRank calculations. Too soon, but,
webmasters realized that in order to get high rankings, all you
needed was a bunch of links. Google caught on but, and
adjusted the algorithms to ensure that only relevant links were
counted.
But what makes up a relevant link? Well, look at a website from
a searchers point of view. If I am the owner of a website and
I’m going to link to other sites, do I want to link to a bunch
of unrelated sites that provide no added value to my site’s
visitors? The answer should be no.
Therefore I want to provide links to relevant related sites
which are a benefit to my site’s visitors. This is the strategy
Google is employing to attempt to determine the relevancy of
links. The links should be related and/or relevant to the site
they are between to.
While there’s a ton of programming and logic involved, this is
essentially what the “new” PageRank does – it devalues those
links that are unrelated or non-relevant to the site to which
they link.
So, now that I’ve provided this brief introduction, lets get
back to the original question – is PageRank dead? Should we
ignore the green bar in our browser? The simple answer is no.
(FYI, if you don’t have the Google Toolbar, you can get it here.
While PageRank has been devalued somewhat by Google it is still
the elemental algorithm Google uses on their index.
While it is right that PageRank is not the ultimate ranking
algorithm anymore, it still contributes to rank. Therefore you
will see sites with a low PageRank value outranking other sites.
But this is due more to the site itself than the number of links
(Go figure – Google is trying to return relevant results
regardless of how many links you have).
In any case, the results you see on Google are better than they
once were and less susceptible to influence by aggressive search
engine optimizers. But that’s not to say that PageRank is dead.
Far from it.
To really know the effect of PageRank, one must know
how Google works.
Google has thousands of interlinked computers inside their data
centers. Each computer has a job. Some calculate PageRank, some
count links, some serve results when queries are performed.
When a site is indexed by Google, it goes into the database
where the algorithms are applied and principles assigned. When a
query is performed, the database is checked and all the sites
which match the query are shortlisted. Then each server is then
told to return only the top results (it may be top 3, it may be
top 10, we don’t know). And guess which factor determines which
top results are returned? You guessed it – PageRank. So if your
site is on a cluster which has a bunch of higher PageRank sites,
then there’s a pretty excellent chance that it won’t make it to that
next amount of processing.
It is at this next amount where PageRank is devalued – and the
pages are sorted based on other factors to ensure they better
match the query. They are then returned to the searcher in the
order Google deems more appropriate to the query. All this
happens in a split second.
A further place where PageRank is extremely helpful is link
building.
As any excellent search engine optimizer knows, links are still
vital. It should seem pretty obvious right through this article
that links are what drives your ranking. All engines use some
form of link popularity to determine rankings, not just Google.
So when you do link building, PageRank can be a fantastic indicator
of the value of a link. Remember, if you are doing link
building, you are first going to want to find useful links and
ones that are of a value to your website’s visitors. But you can
consider PageRank when searching out these links. Because a site
with a higher PageRank will contribute more to your link
popularity than one with a lower PageRank.
This comes with a caveat, but, and that is that no one
apart from Google knows how accurate the PageRank showed in the
Google Toolbar is. It is only updated occasionally, so the right
PageRank can be different than what you see.
That’s why I mentioned above to use the PageRank as an indicator
of the links value, and not the sole criteria when evaluating
what sites you want links from. But as you can probably guess
from the tone of this article – while the PageRank value you see
may be flawed, it is most certainly in use by Google