On PageRank

There's been a lot of talk about PageRank lately. Google has suggested that people are getting too het up over it, and there has been a flood of posts with titles like "Does PageRank Matter Any More?"

My PageRank just increased, and I got a bit of a kick out of it. Do I expect it to change my life? No.

PageRank is like grades in school. It's one indication of how you're doing. If your PageRank is increasing, that's probably a good thing. If your PageRank hasn't improved recently, that's not a good sign.

But just as with grades, it's not the only measure of how your web site is doing. It doesn't measure your value as a human being. And doing things that focus on PageRank rather than on the value of your site to your visitors will probably give you neither a better PageRank nor a better website -- just as focusing on grades rather than learning will usually backfire.

Here's what I've seen with clients and PageRank, though:

• Improving the website from the point of view of the user experience usually leads to an increase in PageRank.
  
• An increase in PageRank is usually followed by higher rankings, or more stable rankings, in search results.

So my conclusion is this: don't work on increasing PageRank. Do notice your PageRank and use it as one of the many ways of measuring how you're doing.

PageRank -- What Is It and Why Should You Care?

PageRank is Google's algorithm for determining how important, useful, and trustworthy a web page is. Google's main search page gets a 10, as does the WCR CSS validation service. This website has a 3, which is not bad since it's only been in existence for a few months. Many of the websites I work with have a PR0 when I meet them, even if they've been around for years.

You can check your PageRank with a Rank Checker Tool like this one from SEOMoz.org. You an also install a toolbar from Google or Firefox that will tell you the PageRanks of all the pages you look at.

Over the holidays, I read an interesting little essay by Jack Strawman claiming that Google's PageRank is a trap and a snare. Here's his thinking: Google shows searchers pages on the basis of PageRank, which is decided by Google. Since Google makes these decisions on the basis of links, and it is practically impossible to get links by any honest means, webmasters have to go to ads instead of search. Since Google has the best online advertising, that means that webmasters will simply have to advertise with Google. Ipso facto, Google has forced us all to pay for ads through them.

Now, Google does in fact decide which pages to show partially on the basis of PageRank. However, I'm #1 at Google for my main keywords, even though I have only PR3, and I am trailed by quite a few older PR4 websites.

And we know that PageRank is based in part upon links. The thinking is that your page, if it is useful, will naturally get links. After that, Strawman's argument breaks down, it seems to me. The claims that follow are questionable, and the argumentation has holes big enough to drive a truck through.

An essay can be interesting without being convincing.

But I thought of it while I was doing year-end reports. It's fun to do year-end reports. I was sending off word to clients that their formerly PageRank zero pages had climbed to PR3, and that their links had quadrupled, and that really makes you feel like it's time to open the champagne.

How did the PageRank increase? Increased links, yes, and in most cases a rewrite, and in several cases a redesign as well. Had their pages become more useful? Yes. Are they getting better search rankings? Yes. Did they buy ads? No.

In fact, only one of my clients bought ads from Google this year. Their redesign isn't complete yet, they've increased their links significantly, and they've gone -- as many of my clients have this season -- from a PR0 to a PR3. Still worth opening champagne for, but it doesn't support the claim that Google has a cunning plot going on.

If PageRank isn't a cheap trick to make you buy Adwords, what is it? According to Google, "PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results."

Or, according to an early academic paper by Lawrence Page which you can read at Stanford's website, "We assume page A has pages T1...Tn which point to it (i.e., are citations). The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. We usually set d to 0.85. There are more details about d in the next section. Also C(A) is defined as the number of links going out of page A. The PageRank of a page A is given as follows:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

Note that the PageRanks form a probability distribution over web pages, so the sum of all web pages' PageRanks will be one."

If they're using 500 million variables and 2 billion terms, not to mention equations which are probably much fancier than this by now, you probably can't guess them all and game them. Why try? Instead, how about making your page trustworthy, useful, and important to human beings?

Because your PageRank is a measure of how well you're doing with your SEO, that's for sure. It's also a measure, though not a perfect one, of how useful your website is. If you don't have the PageRank you think you deserve, then you should contact me and I'll help you fix that. Having a lower PageRank than you deserve means that your website is not being offered to people who are looking for someone like you as often as it should be, so you're not earning as much as you ought to. (I always feel like I deserve a certain market share, don't you?)

PageRank is not, however, a measure of your value as a human being, or even as a company. Nor, in my opinion, is it a cunning plot. It's just a measurement. Measurements can be very useful for telling us whether we're meeting our goals, and for helping us to adjust our strategies if what we're doing isn't working.

An increased PageRank could even be a good New Year's Resolution.

Stumble It!