Seo Test - Real Search Engine Tests

PageRank is a Google term. There’s no point in me repeating what they already tell us so here is their own explanation for PageRank.

Why is it important for you to know what PageRank is? Simply put, you need to know just enough about it to prevent you getting confused by the vast array of incorrect and varied opinions which might lead you to wasting lots of your valuable time.

It seems a majority of webmasters think it’s the be all and end all of getting listed high up in the SERP’s. A minority of them have said all along that they think it’s unimportant, not surprising really, two minutes of playing with the SERP’s might not tell you every fact about PageRank but it certainly tells you that those claiming it is the most important thing are clearly and absolutely, definitely wrong! Does this mean the minority are right?..

Well kind of, I suppose, but like everything else dominated by opinion, the majority of opinions are usually distributed with a large chunk of important facts missing.

The first and most important fact you need to know about PageRank is this, there aren’t many facts about it!  It’s a closely guarded secret. All that leaves us with is the power of simple observation to decipher what PageRank actually does for us.

First let’s get something out of the way here, this is probably where so much misinformation stems from. The PageRank indicator on the Google toolbar, do a search if you don’t know what that is. The toolbar gives us a little green gauge that displays a webpage’s PageRank on a scale from 0 to 10. The best thing you can do with this scale is forget all about 0 to 10 and think of it as just a little green bar. The more green the bar shows then the higher that pages rank is. It’s just a rough indicator to give you an idea of a webpage’s rank. Learn that, know it and then make use of it only if and when you need to. Use it for your observations and experiments but never associate it with what PageRank actually is.

Pagerank is not a set number, it’s infinite. Google cannot run out of PageRank to dish out, this is not how it works or what it is. Think of it as points, a page with a rank of 10 on the toolbar might have an actual rank worth billions of points. This is hard to explain without getting too technical so I won’t bother because it’s not important.

Any given webpage’s PageRank can, in very basic terms, be looked at as the sum of the other web-pages that link to it. All links are valid, they all count something towards a page’s rank whether they are internal from your own site or external links, they all count. External links from other websites are called backlinks and it’s these that get the most attention. They are however not the only links that matter, it’s just that most of the time one external link is worth a lot more than an internal link. Links that are relevant, anchored, not anchored, internal, external etc. all carry a certain amount of weight, some very little, some a lot more but they all add to your rank to some degree. As far as I know, no link is diminishing, none of them will knock your rank down but rather just not add anything if it’s considered worthless.

With the current changes that’s gone on inside Google and penalising paid links, it’s a bit hard to tell yet whether this is true or not. It does seem so far that your rank will only be penalised for selling links, not for receiving them but it’s unclear at the moment. Many people are saying that they have been penalised for buying links but I’m not so sure because they are basing this presumption on the fact their rank has just dropped. But why has it dropped? Is it because the links have actually diminished their rank? If those links just simply no longer count then a drop in rank is going to happen anyway because they’ve now lost their validity. Time will tell on this one.

The bottom line is that everything is valid, not just PageRank. It’s all a question of how much. Saying that PageRank is everything is clearly wrong, type in pretty much any keyword and the SERP’s will tell you this straight away. Saying it is completely unimportant is also wrong.

Google obviously likes internal links, external links, relevancy, PageRank, amount of pages and all the other things. The more you have of one the less you need of the other. The more you have of them all, the better. A  PageRank of one (on the toolbar) might be worth more than a hundred internal pages with a 50,000 word count, I haven’t a clue. What we need to weigh up is how hard it is to get achieve what we want with what we can actually do easily and efficiently.

It’s easy to work on relevancy. It’s easy to add unique content and multiple pages. It’s not so easy to get one way backlinks, even harder now that so many are using nofollow tags.

Everything is valid. Make everything relevant and it becomes even more valid. If it’s difficult to get backlinks to help up your PageRank then stop wasting too much time on it, let them come slowly and naturally in time, instead place your real efforts where you know you are continuously moving forward. A lot of unique content with internal links will also increase your PageRank to some degree.

Posted on October 29th, 2007