Google has you fooled; the negative impact of PageRank.
It’s Friday Morning, 3:38am, and Googlebots everywhere are in frenzy mode. The databases are stirring, and someone, somewhere is receiving a PageRank update. Are you excited yet?
Google’s definition of PageRank
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value.
Translation:
In the most simplistic approach every website has multiple votes. Each vote is an external link. If 50,000 websites link to this article with the anchor text “Google has you fooled”. Google would look at this article as the authority on “Google has you fooled”… that is if no other website has links to it with the anchor text “Google has you fooled”. You can see how this might get complicated if there are 1 million websites competing for that search term. Combine this with the fact that Google takes this “total vote” strategy and smashes it together with the value (PageRank) of the websites voting themselves; you’ve got a hairy situation here and one hell of an algorithm.
Google goes on further to state that:
Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.
Translation:
Ideally, when you search for a set of terms, you want the most relevant website to come up first. In this statement “importance” equals the PageRank and “relevant” equals the matching keywords and surrounding text. What is more logical in those two basic terms, when you search for a set of keywords, do you necessarily want the most “important” page, or do you want the most “relevant” page. I personally vote for relevant. Google tries to do both, but doesn’t always succeed. They need to just focus on creating the ultimate humanoid algorithm based on contextual links (like that’ll happen).
5 Things Google PageRank won’t do for you!
1. Decide your Importance
Despite popular belief; Google does NOT decide your importance. If you think PageRank is an accurate gauge of website importance, in regards to search terms, then you have a lot to learn about how “important” websites and blogs gain PageRank (put on your Grey Thinking Hat for SEO).
2. Decide your Popularity
Google also does NOT decide your popularity. Search engines are, in the simplest form, a popularity contest between websites. Just because you might rank in the number one spot for the search term “Top 10 Christmas Gifts for Bloggers”, it doesn’t mean you are the most popular website(most visited) that has that term used on a website. It means you really know your SEO or you got lucky.
3. Keep you from Top Search Engine Results
PageRank, as discussed earlier, is diluted at this point (actually always was). It’s been noticed that Google has started to rely more on contextual links to a website than PageRank alone. Regardless of the PageRank/Link ratio, you can ALWAYS find a way to get to the top of search engine results without having a high PageRank… it just takes perseverance, time, money, and content.
4. Keep you from Making Money Online
A handful of Online Advertising firms also operate under the false pretense that PageRank is the ultimate guide to website popularity. So if you have a PR2 blog, you might get $20 dollars for a link on your website, if you have a PR4 it might be $60. If you value your own content, rank pretty high for some key search terms, and have a low PageRank you might want to consider advertising for yourself or negotiating higher rates with the Advertising Company you are with.
5. Limit your Traffic
With the semi-recent surge in websites in the service of getting others traffic (think stumbleupon, mybloglog, technorati, etc) Google is not the only source of traffic. That is not to say that Google is unimportant, it is just not the only good source of sustaining traffic. PageRank plays very little into this fact.
If PageRank won’t do these things then who will?
You will. Others will. Natural (unpaid) linking, reviews, and otherwise will determine all of the above. If you are even the mildest authority on a topic, you will get links, you will get reviews, you WILL get noticed: especially by Google.
If you wish to rely on PageRank just to get more from all 42 of your advertising gigs then go for it. I have just started swinging my newly found White Hat SEO around and I’m about to put it on. Would you like your own that fits?
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Nice points, I personally find that PageRank is overhyped.
On my side, I’m not a huge super popular site. PageRank is only 3 at the moment, however searching “pc buying guide” would return my site on the 2nd page. It used to be 1st page (like last week). And it could move between the top 3 spots on the first page of the results or towards the end.
I’m not surprised if it moves from 2nd page to 1st page again. Goes to show. Looking at PRs for those in the 1st page of the results, you’ll see that some have only 1 or 0 PR - goes to show PR does not affect search result.
@goldfries,
exactly my point… just good SEO practices can net you a nice spot alone. PageRank: Faith No More.
Yes, in fact having many links coming to your site doesn’t mean you have good content either.
It could be the site owner just requesting a lot of links from other sites and people just link out of courtesy and all.
Google Analytics would be a better judge of whether a site is good. :)
@goldfries, analytics isn’t a measuring device available to the masses though. We have to deal with what we are given.
Oooooh! It feels so good to see that I’m not the only one that believes page rank is of minimal importance to a web site.
Great article! The only thing I would change is that in number three I would add the word “good” before the word “content”.
Great article Mark. I read this at lunch time at work and have been thinking about it since. Google, smoogle who needs them :)
I had a PR of 4 last time I bothered to checked, but don’t get much traffic at all from google, so what’s the big deal of PR anyway.
ps. how did you get my security word to be used and just what is it getting at :p
Great article Mark, it’s about time more and more people post something like this.
Hopefully more ad networks will stop relying on PR as a way of determining the value of a blog/site.
@Mark Penix
Yes of course, it’s not available for public. :) The next available judge would be Alexa. Not exactly accurate either BUT it does show something and I still think it’s a better gauge of a site than PR.
Come back to IRC, you tool.
(Hello.)
@Linda,
Thanks, “good” content was implied :P
@Moses,
The only problem is that there is NOT an accurate public gauge of website value… aside from pageviews/hits alone.
@Goldfries,
Even though Alexa is geared towards webmaster type crowds I do feel it is a better representation of “popularity”.
@kronix,
You hippy, I might just have to do that soon.
What does a negative page rank mean? I have a -1 on my site.