Demystifying PageRank - What It Is And Isn’t
Posted: July 1st, 2008
PageRank (PR) is probably one of the most debated topics in the SEO world. It has stirred controversy and created misunderstanding since its inception, and many webmasters do not fully understand its true meaning. Even with the dictionary definition in hand, some still struggle to understand PageRank’s implications and effects. First let’s demystify PageRank and absolve ourselves of some popular misconceptions, then investigate how PR can truly affect SEO.
What It Is
To understand the value of PageRank, we should first look at where it comes from.
Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”
In the simplest terms, PageRank is a measure of authority, importance, and trust of a web page. The PageRank of a web page is primarily determined by the number and quality of links pointing to it from other sources, where the “quality” of these sources is measured by its own PR and relevance. This has inherently created a black market for the buying and selling of high PR links, for the purposes of increasing one’s own PageRank.
PageRanks are assigned to every individual web page of a website. Often times when people are mentioning the PageRank of a website, they are actually referring to the website’s homepage (index.htm/index.html/index.php/etc).
PageRank is logarithmically scaled, meaning that achieving higher PRs is exponentially more difficult. PageRanks go from 0 to 10, with PR10 being the highest. Some prominent PR10 websites include Adobe, Intel, NASA, and the World Wide Web Consortium.
What It Isn’t
Toolbar PageRank (TBPR) is not the “true” PageRank, and the true PR of a page is known only to Google. When people refer to PageRank or PR, they are usually talking about Toolbar PageRank, whether they know it or not. TBPR is only a snapshot of a page’s PageRank, and is shown as the visible green bar (or the corresponding number) in the Google Toolbar. TBPR is only updated once every few months.
PageRank is not directly related to a page’s rank in search engine result pages (SERPs). This is probably one of the biggest misconceptions surrounding PageRank, and Google is partially to blame for this with statements like:
Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.
Despite such misleading claims, as well as claims from unscrupulous SEOs, empirical evidence suggests otherwise. If PR was really an appreciable factor in appearing at the top of search results, then all the Adobes, NASAs, and government sites would be listed somewhere in the first ten pages for any search query. Most webmasters see little to no changes in search traffic after an increase or decrease in their PRs.
PageRank may very well play some (small) role in the SERP algorithm, but far too much emphasis is being placed on it.
PageRank’s True Effect
As mentioned earlier, PageRank is a measure of authority, importance, and trust. This qualitative statement does have quantitative repercussions - although it’s not SERP ranking.
PageRank affects the number of indexed pages for a given website. This fact particularly concerns websites with a large number of pages, and has a negligible effect for smaller websites. In the case of a large website, developing PageRank (directly or indirectly) is important since your pages can’t show up in the search results if they aren’t even indexed.
If anything, PageRank / Toolbar PageRank should be viewed as a general diagnosis of a website’s link health.
“Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.”
What Google means here is that pages with a higher PagRank will rank higher for a given search term. Assuming any 2 sites are fully optimized for the keyphrase “best home business” for example…
The one with the higher PageRank will usually rank higher when someone searches on the term, “best home business.” PageRank is a multiplier and is very important when ranking a site:
Content Score X PageRank Score = Rank Score
You can only optimize a webpage’s content so much, once that threshold is reached it’s going to be PageRank that puts you on top of your niche.
I think PR is an odd animal. I have seen virtually useless websites with 4 pages indexed shoot up to a PR4, yet I tried to get the homepage of a 15 page web development website up over PR3 for a couple months without success (although this was back when I didn’t know much about SEO).
My site Project Swole, updated at least every other day, has been PR4 for half a year or so, but my friend’s site Better Body Journal has been PR5 for longer than that, and he doesn’t even post regularly. I believe at one point in time he invested some time into hardcore link building on related websites. This supports the theory that PR has alot to do with backlink authority.
I am talking from just a user point of view (my own experience), that after I optimised my meta tags and content of my Art website, I still waited a long time until my PR passed to 3 in order to get traffic from google, before that I wasn’t appreciated in SERP’s. so I think that combination of tags, content, and PR that get you to a higher SERP ranking.
Optimizing for Search Engines
oh this is so confusing ,it will take some time for me to get hold of this concept
Hm, interesting. I always knew that the Toolbar pagerank isn’t the same thing as real page rank, but it never really occured to me that the isn’t a clear correlation between ranking in search results and PR. Obviously you have a good point with the Nasa, goverment etc stuff.
And yeah, some of my sites with lower PR seem to be ranking better than some with higer. That obviously has to do with the competition as well, but still. Good point. Thanks :D!
Thanks for taking some of the mystery out of this concept for me. In particular, I’m glad to know that PageRank is only updated every few months.
I’m having a hard time figuring out how to get a page rank, I’ve read and read and tried to implement as many seo techniques as I can but I still have a 0 pagerank.