Google Page Rank
Google Page Rank is generally loved or hated by webmasters and unknown or ignored by the general public.
Google page rank is a ’score’ out of 10 that google give to every website, and every individual page within a website. It is intended to denote the importance of that page. You can see it as a little ‘green bar’ on the ‘google toolbar’ and when you hover your mouse over the bar it tells you the score. See the bottom of this page if you don’t yet have the google toolbar.
Why bother? Well in principle it tells you how many other sites have linked to that site, which tells you if hundreds of people found it interesting and useful, or not many others. So you can be confident that if you are reading a ‘page rank 6′ article then it is quite an esteemed article.
But then the problems start. Originally, google gave the page rank of a page quite a lot of importance when choosing which pages to list first when somebody searched in google. So of two pages of similar content - one PR (pagerank) 6 and one PR1 - the PR6 page would be returned first.
Over time, however, the search engines have become much better at actually reading all the content on the page and using that to decide what is important, and have much reduced the importance of the PR in the equation. It is very common for a PR3 page, say, to outrank a PR6 page. They also look at the content of the page that is linking to your site, and the ‘authority’ or importance of the other site, to decide whether it is a valuable link.
Without going into details, the page rank of a page is determined by the page rank of the pages that link to it, and the number of other links on that page. So if a PR8 page linked to this page and no one else, very quickly this page would become a PR5 or PR6, possibly even PR7.
But although that would look good, remember that my position in the search engines depends on the content of this page and the content of the page that has linked to me, and only slightly on the PR.
So now we can see the problem. If I get a link (or hundreds of links) from pages on other sites, sites that are not relevant to my content, I WILL get an increase in PR, but I WILL NOT get significantly improved position in the search engines.
Hence, there is a divergence between the PR of a page and the real importance of that page. I can very easily (if I have the money) go and buy links on ten PR6 pages, and in no time at all I also will have a PR6. Yippee, it sounds impressive, but it won’t bring in any extra visitors.
(Just for the record as a directory owner - I believe that well categorised directories do offer important search engine benefits AND page rank. In the example of ‘divergence’ above I am thinking more of the site that sells 20 links to completely unrelated sites at the bottom of every page, or has a hundred page links section that does reciprocal links with all possible sites, regardless of their relevance to the subject of the main site.)
There are frequent discussions about how important a role Page Rank plays in search engine rankings. Many claim it now plays no role at all, while others believe it still pays a relevant and important role. In truth no-one knows what importance google give PR.
Fact is, if you have lots of relevant links from highly ranked sites you will get a high PR and rank well in the search engines. If you try and speed the process along by buying links from irrelevant sites it will not help your rankings.
Note however that buying links from relevant sites can have real benefits, in terms of visitors to your site, search engine rankings, and page rank, and is a valid way to get a new site ‘discovered’, so that people find it in the first place. Otherwise your masterpiece may remain forever both PR zero AND invisible.
We can only hope that in the future the two - PR and search engine rankings - come back in line. If I get a link to my travel site, in tiny writing, at the bottom of a page on a different site about hair colouring or pharmaceutical products, it should pass neither search engine benefits or page rank - since it really isn’t a ‘vote’ for my site at all.
Getting the google toolbar: Just in case you don’t yet have firefox and the google toolbar, there is a little picture on the right of this page which you can click on to install them. Your life will never be the same again, as you find your eyes forever drawn to the little green bar…and Firefox is a great browser and easy to install as well.