The Seven Lifes of PageRank

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The last page rank update took place last week bringing joy and frustration to web-masters and SEO experts around the world.

Why is PageRank important?

PageRank is a link metric that shows how popular and relevant a web-page is on the Internet. It depends on the amount of inbounds links from relevant websites. If you have a good PageRank then you are more likely to be ranked above any other lower ranked page. The PR score is based on individual URLs, not domains. Technically, there's no such thing as a "PR 4" website.

Is PageRank still relevant?

Various strategies to manipulate PageRank have been employed in concerted efforts to improve search results rankings and monetize advertising links.

Page and Grin had the idea that information on the web could be ordered in a hierarchy by "link popularity" where a page with more links will be ranked higher. The links were meant to be natural endorsements for websites with high quality content. The concept has evolved and Google has corrected. In the original PageRank, link weight was divided equally among the number of links on a page and the notion of topical relevance was not included. Today, we see many companies selling links from high PageRank web-pages and exchanging links with related web-pages. PageRank was a good quality indicator assuming that most of people link to a valuable content website. However, paid links, mandatory links, link exchange and other strategies have distorted and impacted the reliability of the original PageRank concept. It seems the right time for Google to come up with a different concept to measure the quality of a web-page.

Don't get obsessed with PageRank

In words of Matt Cutts,“PageRank while important, it’s one of the most important out of 200 signals that we have, is still one of only 200 signals that we use in ranking.”

Google likewise all the major search engines try to return to the user the most relevant results from the most trusted sources. They use PageRank to calculate the rankings assuming that high quality pages should receive more high quality links. In an attempt to stop the links markets, they have to come up with a new metric to measure the value of each link.

Due to the fact that most of the links are not natural endorsements, it would be better if the ranking would rely more on the quality of the content. Mentions in social media sites are becoming more influential. However, for online retailers and business providers the most relevant figures to evaluate success are number of visitors, conversion rates, sales and revenue.

Alternatives to PageRank

SEOmoz has introduced MozRank as an alternative to PageRank. MozRank’s logarithmic scale ranges from 1 to 10 and is more specific by two decimal places to increase accuracy. It is basically a link popularity score that compares backlinks. In spite of its increasing popularity, they haven't been able to dethrone PageRank.

Website grader is an efficient tool to evaluate website content and online performance. It analyses factors such as meta-tags, Alexa ranking, readability level and blog articles among many others. Still missing bounce rate and CTR analysis. These two factors should become more influential in determining the quality of a website.

In spite of all the criticism, PageRank is very much alive. It is definitevely not as powerful as it once was. Google has confirmed that they do indeed count links from Twitter as a factor in search ranking and they will probably continue tweaking the algorithmuntil they find the most accurate way to measure quality.

How to get good links?

In the meantime, we should still aim to increase our PR and to do so we must acquire quality links. The most relevant aspects that you should consider when evaluating a link are authority, relevance and trust. Start by seeking the most authoritative sites in your field and figure out the best way to approach them in order to get a link. For purely commercial sites is harder to get links from authoritative page unless they are well known brands. You will need some non-commercial content such as advice, independent reviews or news about your industry. Publishers need a good reason to provide links. You have to offer something valuable and unique to the user. However, take into consideration that this is only one factor of your SEO and online marketing strategy.