Should You Care About Google PageRank?

It’s really too bad that Google’s PageRank was named after one of its founders Larry Page. A more apt term and less misunderstood term would be Peer Rank. PageRank was developed by the two founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, and named after Page. Google search engine started as a project in graduate school at Stanford by these two. They developed the concept of PageRank based on their knowledge of publishing in academic journals. Professors get recognition and many are expected to publish in academic journals that are reviewed by their peers. A publication’s importance and ranking is determined by the number of citations from ranking journals it receives. PageRank was developed based on this concept. The peer review of a web site is the quality of the sites that are linking to it.

Google explains PageRank on the Google Technology page as: “PageRank 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 considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, 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." Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages' relative importance. “

PageRank was created to provide more relevant results for search queries. Rather than allowing spammers to control the importance of a site by the number of links to it PageRank ranks the backlinks so that higher ranked websites linking to a site have more weight than lower ranked websites. This is Google’s way of determining the importance of a page.

PageRank is an important part of Google’s algorithm but only part of the equation. They consider many other factors in determining the actual rankings of a website for a key phrase. For example, choose a key phrase and review the PageRank of the top 10 serp’s. You will see that the rankings are not listed by PageRank.

Yes it is valuable to have inbound links from websites with high PageRank. It is even more valuable to have inbound links from websites with high PageRank that have a related topic. The number of links outbound from the website that links to another website also determines the value of a link. A high PageRank website with a related topic with only 12 outbound links is much more valuable than one with 50 outbound links. PageRank also looks at outbound links from your website. It is best to avoid links to low quality sites as this may have a negative effect.

PageRank is absolutely worth caring about. However, a far more important thing to care about is creating fresh, high quality content consistently for your website and links and improved PageRank should follow.

Lynn Jebbia is a Senior Project Manager at ArteWorks SEO. Her focus is
SEO Strategy, Keyword Analysis, Competitive Analysis, Web Site Audits, Pay Per Click Management and Client Account Management.