New Orleans Internet Marketing

What is PageRank?

If you’re completely new to search engine optimization, then you may not even know what PageRank is. Start by downloading the Google Toolbar. You may have to enable the PageRank display in the settings. Below are some examples of what PageRank indicators look like on a page form the Google Directory, viewed through a web browser with the Google Toolbar.



PageRank is displayed on the toolbar as a scale from 0 – 10, with “10″ being the “most important” pages on the web, and “0″ being the “least important” pages on the web. On the toolbar, PageRank is only displayed as an integer; however, in reality, PageRank is an infinite scale from 0 – 10. It is important to differentiate between “Toolbar” pagerank, and “actual” pagerank.

Actual PageRank is the factor that is computed by Google’s algorithm to determine the “importance” of a web page. While the toolbar PageRank is only updated about once every 4 – 5 months, actual PageRank is dynamically updated as changes occur in Google’s index.

The main variable used to compute PageRank was linking structure throughout the web. It was noted that one of the best ways to determine the importance of a web page was by looking at the sites that link to it. The idea being that better quality sites would “naturally” get more links; therefore, a link to a web page could be treated as a “vote” for that web page. While this remains the basic concept, it becomes far more complicated as algorithms evolve due to the many different aspects of web pages and the ability of people to manipulate search results if more factors aren’t considered.

All “votes” are not created equal in PageRank. A link from a high ranking site, like dmoz.org, is more important than a link from a low PageRank site with few links going to it. I’m going to intentionally leave out a lot of search engine ranking factors here because I want to keep this post on topic. Search engine rankings for particular topics or keywords are not directly correlated to PageRank. There are many cases when more relevant pages show up higher in the search results than less relevant, higher PageRank pages.

Anomalies with “Toolbar PageRank”
Another important aspect aspect to consider is that there are a few anomalies associated with the PageRank scale as it’s shown on the Google Toolbar. One is the fact that it’s only updated every quarter, and sometimes less often than that. Because of that, sites that are new, may take a while to get “Toolbar PageRank.” I’ve also seen a lot of cases where the initial toolbar PageRank was higher than what they ended up having in subsequent updates.

Another anomaly is the fact that the scale seems to change over time. If you think about it, it makes sense because the internet is constantly growing while the scale remains a number 1 – 10. That being said, it should follow that websites who were at one point a PR5, that don’t build links over time, will see a decrease in their PageRank as it’s displayed by the toolbar over time. This is something I’ve seen on older websites I own. I used to be able to get a PR5 from the toolbar with just a few hundred average links, whereas these days it takes significantly more link building effort to achieve the same toolbar PageRank. The “kicker” is that these “toolbar PageRank” changes may not be associated with loss in rankings at all.

It’s because of the concept of internet growth mentioned above, and penalties that I will discuss next, that I’ve often seen a website’s search rankings go up, even though their toolbar PageRank went down!

The last anomaly I should address about the toolbar is that occasionally you will find websites whose toolbar PageRank has been penalized. It’s something that is most often noticed when you’re looking at competitive search results, and you find it strange that the top results are all well-optimized web pages, yet one on top has a significantly lower PageRank than those beneath. While this can usually be attributed to on-page SEO factors, sometimes it’s because Google actually penalized the toolbar PageRank of the site because it was selling links at one point in time. The strange thing about these types of toolbar PageRank penalties is that they seem to only affect the toolbar and not the website’s actual search engine rankings. This would indicate that “actual PageRank” has not been affected. Sometimes these penalized websites can get their “toolbar PageRank” back through appeal, but that’s not always the case.

As you can see based on these anomalies, there are quite a few reasons that the toolbar may not be indicative of how a website ranks in the search engines.

So is PageRank important?
Yes and No. In my opinion focusing on PageRank is a waste of time. You should focus on building content and relevant links to your site. As far as incoming links go, it’s my opinion that the ideal is to have a mixture of high and low PageRank sites linking to yours. Ideally you want your incoming links to have a “natural” appearance to the search engine. If only high PageRank sites link to yours, it may appear that the links were bought; and if only low PageRank sites link to yours, it may appear that your site doesn’t have valuable content. I will discuss link building in more detail in later posts. There are many different link building techniques that can have a dramatic impact on your search engine rankings.

Related Posts

• Anomalies with Google’s “Toolbar PageRank”
• BlogCatalog.com Gets Toolbar PageRank Penalty from Google
• SEO Basics: Write Articles to Help Build Relevance and Links
• Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Basics
• Getting Started with Google Adwords: The Basics