Part 2 of our Description of Google PageRank

• Mar. 19, 2003

Google developed an easy, user friendly way to qualify pages.  They called it PageRank.  In essence, what page rank does is gather hundreds of points about a site or page and use those criteria to qualify the page and assign a ranking to it.  This ranking or PageRank can then be viewed using the Google Toolbar, which you can download for free from the Google website. In essence you are getting Google’s recommendation about a site, based on its PageRank.  The higher the PageRank, the more likely it will be a relevant source of information for you.

 

Here’s the catch to this:  Many SEO’s get so focused on PageRank that they lose focus of their job.  After all, the PageRank is a good indicator, but that’s all it is – an indicator.  One of hundreds of other factors that can affect a site’s ranking for a key phase.  You can test this by doing a search at Google.  I searched for “revolutionary stuff” just because it was the first phrase that came to mind.  The PageRank’s for the top 10 pages came out as follows:

 

1. 7
2. 5
3. 5
4. 2
5. 4
6. 3
7. 2
8. 0
9. 4
10. 4

 

As you can see, Google ultimately uses other factors INCLUDING PageRank to determine how to rank sites for a chosen keyphrase.  Therefore those SEO’s who focus on PageRank are ultimately doing a disservice to their clients because there is more involved in actual search engine rankings than PageRank.

 

So, aside from the fact that Google only uses PageRank as part of the value when determining rank, what other factors will help you rank highly in a search engine?

 

Googling PageRank Part 3