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Page Rank Importance
Uncategorized
The PageRank Gauge
PageRank, a simple online tool invented by Google to measure the quality of web pages and websites. However, in the past 5 years, it seems that PageRank has turned into the most valuable asset a website and URL can have. At one point, it is true, that Google even used PageRank as a large determining factor of where a website would show up in Google search results. But is this still true? If you have a good PR does it mean that you will be hitting top end search outcomes most of the time? And what can you do with your website or blog if you have a good page rank?
PageRank and Website quality:
Ah, the endless debate about how good PR is at measuring web page and website quality. Let me start
by saying that, I believe PageRank is the worst measurement of website quality, and that it is a direct result of irrelevant search outcomes. Why?
In order for me to answer this question, we will need to know a little about how PageRank works and how it is determined. To quote Google, PageRank is determined buy a “vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes”, meaning that if you have a link from a web page with a PR of 5, Google will also increase the value of your web page as it thinks that ‘if a high quality web page recommended it, then it MUST be good’, and herein the problem lies. If you have ever tried to manually increase your PR, you will know that there are websites out there where you can buy, sell and exchange links. This has meant that websites with poor, unmanaged and unoptimized content can get high PR’s by simply paying $70.00 a month to get a link from a high quality website, which is exploiting the marketing commodity that Google has kindly offered to them. Yes folks, for $70.00 a month you too, can get a steady high PageRank on your website, which you can later exploit yourself, by selling links from your website to other poor websites. Of course, Google has tried to restrict this sort of practice by measuring the quality of outbound links as well as inbound links, so if you are linked to a poorly performing website, your website too will suffer. But this has also been of little help, as many of these link directories often only exchange links with websites with existing PageRanks, which means that they are not penalized for linking to poor sources. What this, in turn means for honest website developers and administrators, is that simply maintaining and regularly updating your website is no longer enough, you also need to be paying large amounts of money every week to ensure that your website is getting the recognition it deserves.
Another factor that is used to determine the PR value is the amount of time your website has been online. The keen observer will notice that websites that have existed for at least 2 years will have a respectable PR of at least 3. However, personally, I know that many of these website have not been updated in several months and are not at all rich in content. In my own experience, I have seen a ‘Contact Us’ web page with literally 4 lines of text about how to contact this particular company with a PageRank of 3, just because it has been online for over 3 years. Now, some of you may be thinking that “maybe the website was really good with lots of rich content and information”, well let me tell you, that this was also not the case, the website itself, was very basic in structure and content, with only 6 static web pages and not more than a paragraph of content on each page. When I spoke to the website administrator about his website, he informed me that he had bought a the URL several years ago, just after it expired, and that it had been linked to a website for 2 years before he had purchased it. To me, this seems to be an extremely unfair method of exploiting Google, and leads me on to my next point….
Expired Domains and purchasing existing URL’s – URL investment.
Many of you may be aware of websites such as www.afternic.com where you can bid to purchase URL’s which are expired or about to expire, and where you can also sell and auction your own URLs. This leads on from my previous point about unfair internet practices, where poor quality websites can receive a quick boost by purchasing web URL’s with existing inbound links and PageRank. Furthermore, if you have ever browsed through these websites you may know that it can be quite pricey. A URL with a PageRank of 5 and several hundred inbound links can set you back a good $ 20 000 if not more, but be careful, use all of the search engine tools available to you to research the URL before committing to buy it, as there are many URLS out there that are a rip off. In fact, these sorts of practices have continued to ensure that quality websites do not always show up first online, and many have made a good living by purchasing URLS, building a PR and later selling them for a killing. It seems that instead of investing in real estate, paintings or shares, you should consider URL investment.
PageRank relevance to SERPS
For those of you who feel hard-done-by, at this point, you are right to feel this way, I know I do. However, there is some light at the end of this blog. In my experience, I have found that my website blogs have been hitting consistently high webpage search results, despite not having a PageRank. Maybe it is because they are so damn good and search engines want to reward me for my insightful criticisms of the internet and, therefore of society, or maybe, it is because someone at Google has a crush on me (I’m not surprised), however, I think the most likely explanation for this sort of search engine behaviour, is the fact that my website is a quality one, which is continuously updated and looked after with frequent changes and improvements. In fact, a SEO company in Germany, recently found that PageRank is a very low contributing factor to search engine outcomes, and that things like header tags, and title tags are significantly more prioritized.
In this blog I have tried to show that PR practice that Google is implementing is not an effective one as it leads to obvious and easy misuse and abuse. However, I do think that it is important to keep these thoughts in perspective to what is currently happening. Google is placing less importance on PageRank, and more importance on content. Whilst I think that, the whole linking idea still stinks, there has been an undeniable improvement in Google’s search engine result relevance since my last blogs (I am unashamed to admit), and I am happy to see Google continuously striving to perfect their algorithms.
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