Posts tagged pagerank
Google: Chrome Page Will Have PageRank Reduced Due To Sponsored Posts
Jan 3rd
After reviewing its own sponsored post campaign, while Google says it feels there are no “remaining” violations of its guidelines, the search engine’s spam fighting team is going to reduce the PageRank value of the Google Chrome home page. From the statement Google sent me:…
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Oh No! What Happened To My PageRank? by @rustybrick
Oct 6th
There has been a lot of discussion and scare on Twitter and within the SEO forums that Google has disabled the Toolbar PageRank scores from working. The truth is, no they have not.
As several sites have reported already, PageRank is still alive in the Toolbar but Google changed the lookup URL. …
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Google: Low PageRank & Bad Spelling May Go Hand-In-Hand; Panda, Too? by @mattmcgee
Oct 5th
If your website and/or web pages have low PageRank, it’s possible that they also suffer from poor spelling and grammar.
Google’s top spam cop, Matt Cutts, made the correlation between low PageRank and poor spelling in a Google Webmaster Help video just made public today. In responding to a…
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Google PageRank and Its Effect on SEO – Hit Search
Jul 7th
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Google PageRank and Its Effect on SEO
Hit Search Because of this, PageRank has become important in the field of Search Engine Optimisation, or SEO for short, and companies work diligently to improve their PageRank in the hope of laying claim to a coveted place at the top of first page Google search … Google notifies webmasters of suspicious incoming links |
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Google Continues to Encourage Site Owners to Think Beyond PageRank
Jul 1st
The latest blog post from Google Webmaster Central remind site owners what many of us have been saying for years: The Google Toolbar PageRank number is a terrible SEO metric (I may be paraphrasing a bit). Webmaster Trends Analysis (and knitter extraordinaire) Susan Moskwa, who wrote the post, says:…
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Why PageRank Isn’t A Useful Metric For International Link Building
May 31st
Do we need to look at different ways of thinking about Page Rank in international markets — especially when it comes to link building? New data suggests a significant variety of link graphs between countries — which link builders need to build into their strategies and planning.
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New Google PageRank Algorithm Debunked
Feb 23rd
In my recent article on SEJ about Google PageRank I suggested that a new formula could be in action. The article has gone big on Twitter and LinkedIn, with hundreds of shares. And from some comments, it looks like many people accepted it for a fact.
Now I hate to break it but I have to admit that I was most probably wrong. So I need to write this follow-up article to prevent yet another SEO myth from spreading. Let me explain what happened:
- I saw an unreasonably low toolbar PageRank value for my blog after the last update;
- I started looking around for possible reasons;
- I noticed many people observed similar effects;
- I found an article by Bill Slawski about Google’s Reasonable Surfer model, which seemed to explain my observations and other people’s rankings well;
- I decided to share my findings for consideration and discussion.
And the discussion followed! My article collected about 100 comments, and a few SEO experts came up to correct me. The problem is, too many people accepted the alleged news without doubt and spread it further, so now it is my responsibility to get things staight.
So what was the real cause of poor ratings?
Special thanks to Donna Fontenot for providing the most likely explanation for the effect that I and other webmasters observed. The toolbar PageRank value is known to lag substantially even after an update. Matt Cutts mentioned it in his blog post about what is a Google update.
Please note the difference between the toolbar PageRank (TBPR) and Google’s internal PR value used as one of their 200+ factors to rank pages. I should have made this distinction more clear in my original article, too. Toolbar PageRank is more or less useless today because of how rarely it gets updated, and how much it lags. You can safely ignore it. If you are good with your link building, you will notice that from improvements in your search rankings first, and toolbar PageRank value will catch up eventually.
This devaluation of toolbar PageRank even makes quite a few people declare that “PageRank is dead”. This includes some industry experts. Be careful when listening to these proclamations. Those people know what they are talking about, but they are referring to toolbar PageRank value, not the Google’s internal formula. Internal PR is still a significant ranking factor, albeit only one of the hundreds.
And what about the Reasonable Surfer model?
I based my previous explanation of poor TBPR ratings after the recent update on Google’s Reasonable Surfer patent. But the thing is, a patent does not equal implementation! Google has hundreds of patents. They even seem to have a weight loss related patent. This does not mean they are secretly crafting weight loss into their ranking algorithm.
On one hand, some parts of the Reasonable Surfer model could have been tested by Google even before they filed the patent (and that was in 2004). On the other hand, some parts of it may still not be implemented, either because of engineering difficulties, or because of too much noise in the suggested signals. I don’t know the current status of this model’s implementation, and I’m afraid Google will not disclose it.
I, for one, would welcome the change if they crafted this model directly into the PR and TBPR formula. That would make the link building efforts of those webmasters who are focused on TBPR more productive. It’s an easily observable single indicator, and it is often used for bragging and comparison, so it would be nice if it correlated more with the true quality of the page’s link profile.
In any case, it is worth your time to learn about this model, because it has a good chance to influence your rankings one way or another, now or in future. Just don’t take this for a hard fact. Here is one more good article about this model: The reasonable surfer; makes for unreasonable thinkers.
What practical conclusions you can make from this?
Number one conclusion is: do not trust everything you read. If someone publishes an article on a reputable site, that does not make him an expert. If someone is an expert, that does not mean he is always right. And even if someone is right, that does not mean the same applies to your situation. Be especially careful about trusting any anecdotal evidence. Double-check any information you plan to apply to your business or communicate to your customers.
Next, while the Reasonable Surfer model may not be fully implemented yet, the work performed in that direction indicates that search engines are not happy with simple mechanical ratings, and want their rankings to match the human behavior closer. While for now you may still enjoy some results from link spam, rest assured that search engines will be fighting to make it obsolete. So do not make your business or your customers depend on cheap links entirely.
One more reminder: don’t pay much if any attention to toolbar PageRank values. If you want to brag about your site, talk about unique visitors and conversion rate. If you want to find influential online partners, ask them about the same. That green bar just doesn’t mean too much today.
And finally, if you write an article about a high-impact subject like PageRank, make all the necessary terminology distinctions very clearly, and consult real experts in the field before publishing, even if you have years of relevant business experience under your own belt.
Credits
Thanks to Barry Adams for raising an alarm about my previous article in a way that no-one could ignore. Thanks to David Harry for dissecting it at SEOBS and for reviewing this follow-up (Editor’s note: the link to SEOB post was added by Ann. Cheers, Dave!). Thanks to all the readers for your support and understanding!
If you retweeted or otherwise shared my previous article, please share this one, too. Don’t let yet another SEO myth spread over the Internet. In fact, share it anyway, it will not hurt. Thank you!
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
New Google PageRank Algorithm Debunked
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Changing Your SEO Strategies to Google’s New PageRank Reality – BlogHer (blog)
Feb 8th
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Changing Your SEO Strategies to Google's New PageRank Reality
BlogHer (blog) Google PageRank has been a gold standard for SEO. Website owners and marketers are obsessed with it because it is one of the most visible ranking factors in … |
View full post on SEO – Google News
New PageRank Formula May Change Your SEO Priorities
Feb 3rd
cc licensed flickr photo shared by toprankonlinemarketing
The vast majority of website owners seem to be obsessed with PageRank. It was one of the heaviest ranking factors in the original Google algorithm, and the fame persists. I must admit that I also find it hard to ignore the single most visible feedback figure presented by Google.
Google has been worried about all the unnatural link spam that results from this. They emphasized that they used about 200 ranking factors, and that webmasters were better off focusing on creating valuable content and improving their conversion rates.
Yet no-one seemed to listen much. PageRank was bought, stolen and begged for in every possible way. So now Google seems to work extra factors into PageRank value itself. This is very logical: if webmasters are so focused on achieving high PageRank, why not make link quality a part of the formula?
New Google’s patent hints at a new PageRank formula
On May 11, 2010 a patent was granted to Google for “Ranking documents based on user behavior and/or feature data”. Bill Slawski wrote a great post about it, so I won’t go into too much detail here, just give you a brief summary.
There is one key difference the new patent suggests. Previously, each link on a page passed the same amount of authority to the target page. Now, every link is weighted according to how likely a “reasonable surfer” would be to click on that link. To estimate that, Google considers a number of factors, which boil down to 2 main categories:
- link visibility (placement and appearance)
- link relevance
So, you can say goodbye to small text links in page footers, forum and blog comments, stuffed sidebars, link exchange pages and other similar link spammer paradise areas. They didn’t bring much PageRank juice before, now they will hardly bring any at all. To pass PageRank, the link now has to achieve the same thing as to get the click: stand out prominently from the rest of the page, and be relevant.
Why I believe PageRank formula is really changing?
I have recently launched a new blog on web tracking. Having some experience with online promotion, I started building links for it. Here is what I did:
- submitted the blog to several directories
- submitted about 10 articles to article directories
- used signature links in a few forums and blogs
- submitted links to several social bookmarking sites
I also have a small personal site, danylchuk.com, which I don’t promote in any meaningful way. It has PageRank 2, with 5 links visible in Yahoo tool and 14 links in Google Webmaster Tools. So I added a few links from that one too, as it had some relevant content.
Overall, in a month I was able to get about 130 links indexed in Yahoo Site Explorer and 240 links indexed in Google Webmaster Tools for my new blog. I was generally pleased with the result, watching the site starting to rank on a few keywords, and waiting to see the toolbar PageRank update, just for the fun of it. I was expecting to see a PageRank 2 or 3 with those links.
How surprised I was when finally a few pages got their PageRank, and it turned out to be… Zero! Not even one. Nevermind that I saw a few sites with similar or worse link profiles have a better rank, take that small personal site that I mentioned for example.
I started digging around for a possible explanation. I noticed other webmasters observing similar effects. And then, I found the post by Bill Slawski and this new Google patent. Now this all seems to fit together perfectly.
The link building techniques that I used worked well several years ago. And they still produce some results, just not as good as they used to. Now I figure this could be because of the change in PageRank formula.
What does this mean for you and your blog?
With this possible change in PageRank algorithm, is it time to change your link building habits? Google tries to follow the real user behavior and real traffic patterns, so you should focus on these even more. In a way, Google has just made your job easier. Now you can focus on live visitors and assume that Google will try to use the same hints.
As an added bonus, you will decrease your dependency on Google. There is no way to be wrong here – if you build great click-through traffic sources with natural linking, you win regardless of Google’s policies.
So I suggest you to scale down these link building methods in favor of others:
- Forum posting and blog commenting. It has plenty of benefits, but don’t do that in hopes of increasing your PageRank.
- Social bookmarking. Same as above, share what you think is valuable. You can get some click-through traffic, but don’t expect any PageRank.
- Article submission. Don’t go for the numbers, submit to top directories to get traffic, syndication and recognition.
- Bulk directory submission. It’s probably not worth your time and money any more.
- Bulk link exchange. This is explicitly discouraged by Google now, and can get you banned from their search results.
I don’t mean you should stop doing all of the above. Remember about link diversity, both for SEO and traffic building reasons. Get some extra links if that’s easy, but focus on high quality links in your strategy. I believe any extra one-way links can’t hurt you, otherwise it would be too easy for competitors to bomb each other with bad links.
Now, some quality link building methods to scale up:
- Guest blogging. It’s the most reliable way to get a quality context link on a reputable, relevant blog.
- Link baiting. While it is hard to create a successful link bait, one success can pay for several failures.
- Press releases. With some effort and some luck, you can get a quality link from big media.
- Joint ventures. Get to know people and discuss how you can do business together. Be creative.
- Building communities. Create a resource that attracts a targeted community, and they will link to you.
As you may notice, the methods that bring the highest quality links are also the ones which are widely used by the bloggers, and which can benefit a lot from their already high social activity. So as a blogger, you should probably welcome the change, and hope that the Internet will become a better place for everyone, with less spam and clutter.
And listen to the advice from Google. Pay less attention to PageRank and more attention to your content, traffic and conversion rates.
As someone who took a start in Internet marketing back in 2002, I have some nostalgia for the days of easy SEO. But I welcome the new world of quality links and fair rankings (well, Google, good luck with that!) If everyone has to play by the same fair rules, I am happy to join and take the extra effort.
There may be no new PageRank formula in reality. Maybe the data in my case study can be explained by pages with too many links per page, or temporary glitches when ranking new pages. Still, even if the PageRank value itself will not change, the new Google patent clearly outlines their priorities in ranking. You should seriously consider introducing the suggested changes to your link building strategy. Especially considering that it will bring you more traffic regardless of Google, possibly reducing your dependency on their free search results.
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
New PageRank Formula May Change Your SEO Priorities
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First Google Toolbar PageRank Update Of 2011
Jan 21st
Google has updated the PageRank values of many sites within the Google Toolbar. This is the first toolbar PageRank update of the year, and arguably the first one in almost 9 months. There have been minor updates, where some sites have seen their PageRank change during 2010, but I believe the last…
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