Page Rank Definition
Page Rank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, 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.”
Important, high-quality sites receive a higher Page Rank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines Page Rank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query (http://www.google.com/corporate/tech.html).
Over the past few years there has been alot of debate in regards to Page Rank and for good reason. Google has done alot to try to steer the focus away from the green bar but despite this many webmasters and self seo’s are still trying to do whatever they can to raise the bar. Google’s most recent attempt has been to remove the Page Rank from the google webmasters tools, which in my opinion doesn’t even matter since I hardly ever looked at it anyway. It also appears that Google is not updating the Page Rank as much as they use too, I actually like it this way because it gives a little more time to map things out if you are trying to boost the bar a little.
Probably the greatest debate when it comes to Page Rank is whether or not if it really helps you rank higher in the search engines (mainly Google). Through recent testing I have determined that it does still affect rankings, but not as much as it use to. The focus now clearly appears to be on relevance, I performed a test in two different fashions, first I pointed a link to certain page with a fairly decent Page Rank, the link was way off topic and the result was a very tiny boost in ranking. I then removed that link and waited for the ranking to drop back to where it was before, then I pointed another link which was 100% relevant to the page content and the result was a 1st page ranking. Now this information is really nothing new to those who have been doing seo in proper fashion, nevertheless I wanted to find out if it is still worth pointing links to a site which is not relevant.
So the bottom line is that Page Rank is still an important role in terms of ranking, but if you want to get the best results then it would be wise to make sure that your links are as relevant as possible, the Page Rank of your own site does not really matter, it is the links that point to your site which hold all of the weight. Can you still get links from irrelevant sites? Sure, however the benefit from that is very small unless you have an insane amount of them. I’m sure most would like to hear me say that Page Rank doesn’t matter, if I did that I would telling a lie, the truth is that it does matter and still plays a huge role in how sites are ranked on google. I understand why Google doesn’t want people to focus on it, because doing so produces crappy results in the search engines. If webmasters and self seo’s played their cards right they wouldn’t have to worry about the green bar because their site would be doing what it is suppose to do, which is to rank well on the search engines.
I guess what I’m trying to say is that if you are going to chase the green bar then do it in a fashion which is going benefit your site for the best results. I know most just want to do it so that they can sell links to other sites, if that is the case then so be it, just remember that the site which holds it’s Page Rank will make alot more money then a site who only has it for one update. As always, thanks for reading and may the serps be with you.
