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 occurr 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.

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.