SEO Consult Blog

In light of last weeks PageRank update we thought we would go into more detail about the ins and outs and its relevance in Search Engine Optimisation. Googles PageRanking uses a link analysis algorithm which gives numerically based weighting to each piece of content or a linked set of documents. Its purpose is to measure the relevancy of its importance within this set.

Page Rank is actually a trademark of Goolge and has been patented, however the patent has been assinged to Standford University, not Google, but they have exlcusive rights and exchanged 1.8 million shares with Standford for this. Standford sold these shares four years ago for over 330 million dollars!

How PageRank works

PageRank is democratic and uses its vast link structure to indicate how valuable a page is on a particular website. It works on a voting system which looks at the volume of votes each Link on a pages receives while analyzing the actual page which casts the vote too. If a vote was cast by a page that is considered important, then the vote carries more weight. The reason for this voting system is to help make pages on website become important, helping increase their popularity resulting in more traffic and hopefully more business.

PageRank is the result of a ballot which has been cast among other pages on the web. A hyperlink also counts as a vote. If a page is linked to by many other pages who themselves have a high ranking, then the page is given a high rank. If a page has no links, then no vote is given to that page.

Numeric weightings are afforded each page which tells us how important that page is in the eyes of the seach engine. PageRank is also influenced by other factors such as the relevance of the search words used and how many visits a page gets.
PageRank is the probability that represents the liklihood that someone who randomly clicking on a link will land on a particular website. This probability is expressed in numeric terms with a value between zero and one which are in turn expressed as percentages. In other words a 0.5 chance would be expressed as 50%.

PageRank is not above manipulation though and extensive research is being done in order to identify ways that it which links from inflated PageRank can be ignored. Falesly inflated PageRank is also being investigated.

Ways to improve PageRank

You can start by submitting your website to the Top Directories, especially those who are related to your product or industry. This includes exclusive, membership directories as well

Study your competitor; see who links into their site. Get your clients, sub contractors and partners to link their websites into your site.

Do not get involved in Free for All links, even though they advertise themselves as a popular means of link building, stay away from them if you want to avoid spam. On this note, stay away from building farms too. They exist solely for the purpose of increasing their own link popularity and will most likely consist of links which are not related to your site.

Measuring PageRank has been the sin of many a webmaster and novice SEO since search engines began indexing pages and Google began offering a snapshot of PR. However, there are a number of reasons why your PageRank is unimportant to your efforts and there are also many other more beneficial data sets and statistics to follow that will help improve your SEO and track your performance.

Toolbar PR

The toolbar representation of PageRank is updated approximately once every three months, although recently this has become much more sporadic with many months passing between some updates. This means that at any given time, the toolbar PR offered by Google could be up to six months out of date and that is a long time in an SEO campaign. In any other form of marketing, businesses would reject the use of figures that were six months out of date.

Relevance And Keyword Use

Another problem with tracking the PR of a website is that while it plays some small part in determining your ranking it fails to consider factors such as relevancy and keyword use. A page with a PR of 9 or even 10 will never rank for irrelevant keywords although they may perform extremely well for those keywords that they do target. Improving your PageRank is by no means a guarantee of improving your search engine ranking or, more importantly, the level of traffic you receive from the search engine results.

Targeted Traffic Levels

The entire aim of SEO is to develop a source of targeted traffic. As such, the most beneficial figure to track is the amount of traffic that you receive from Google and the other search engines. Improvements will be easy to spot and you will almost certainly be quick to identify any drop in results. Your own website metrics or raw logs should provide all the information that is required including the search engine that sent visitors to your site as well as the search term that visitor used to find you.

Conversion Rates

SEO is geared towards the driving of targeted traffic. Targeted visitors will spend longer on your site, visit more pages, and will have a higher overall conversion rate than very general, less beneficial visitors. Track your general conversion rates because this will identify areas on your own site that can be improved but also track the conversion figures for your SEO generated traffic. This will help to identify whether or not you are using adequately researched and relevant keywords. Targeting the wrong keywords can be just as damaging as not targeting any at all.

Tracking Relevant SEO Data

The art of SEO requires the tracking of a good amount of data, and the most effective SEO services will typically ignore the toolbar PageRank offered by Google because it does not offer genuinely useful information. Track the number of links a site has, the number of search engine visitors, and the conversion rates for those visitors in preference to an out of date numerical representation of your link count.