SEO Tips & Information

One of the often repeated myths about Google PageRank is that these days it has no effect on the performance of a website in the SERPs. Today Google is supposed to treat content as king and in some ways this is true. Type a search phrase into Google and look at the results. As you go down from position 1 to 10 you’ll find that the PR of the sites in the better positions isn’t always higher than the PR of sites in the lower positions. Sometimes sites with a PR of 0 will outperform pages with PR 5 for a particular keyword. If you write a program to analyse the top 50 results though you’ll usually see a general trend towards lower PageRank values as you go further down the results.

With a little thought it should be pretty obvious that PageRank alone can’t determine the position of a website in the SERPs. Simply because two pages contain the same keywords and have the same pagerank doesn’t mean they’ll appear next to each other in the search results. Read my top 10 SEO factors post for more information on how non-PageRank factors affect the performance of a page in SERPs.

There is one way in which PageRank can have a BIG effect on the performance of a website though. Pages in the supplemental index are unlikely to turn up in the SERPs except for very obscure keywords. The best - if not the only - way of pulling pages out of the supplemental index is to get backlinks from pages with decent PR. The higher the PR of the pages you can get links from the better. With smaller websites that have only 10 or 20 pages, a home page with a PR of 2 or 3 and a half-decent internal linking strategy, most of the site’s pages will be in Google’s main index.

However, with large database-driven sites that have thousands of pages, usually the only way of improving the performance of the site and pulling pages out of the supplemental index is to get some high PR links to the homepage and to node pages within the site. Node pages are pages which link to lots of other pages in the site. In a site like a web directory, an example of a node page is a category page. For large sites, getting links from pages with PR 6 and above are ideal.

You can find the supplemental index ratio for a site using the site: command. First type the following into the Google search box to find the number of pages in Google’s main index for a website (replace www.dowebseo.com by the URL of the domain you want to examine). Note the number of results returned.

site:/www.dowebseo.com

Then type in:

site:www.dowebseo.com

and again note the number of results returned. The ratio of these numbers gives the supplemental index ratio for a site. For a large site with 30,000 pages and a homepage PR of 3 or less it’s fairly common to get a ratio of 0.075 meaning that less than 1% of the pages on the site regularly turn up in the SERPS. Getting some good links from high PR pages should pull more pages out of the supplemental index within a few weeks. For tips on link-building and ideas on where to find high PR pages, see link-building using dofollow blogs and link-building using dofollow forums.

General SEO, Google PageRank, Link-building

It looks like a Google PageRank export has just happened and as always there are winners and losers.

Of the sites I’m associated with, my main site gained PR on some inner pages and my three blogs remained at the same PR. An arcade site and a shareware downloads site though gain a PR of 2 and 1 respectively from PR 0. My Software development site though went to PR 1 from 2. This last drop wasn’t unexpected as I haven’t done any link-building except for forum posting.

Google PageRank

Google assigns each web page a PageRank between 0 and 10, The PageRank is a measure of the weight or importance Google gives the web page: 0 is the lowest importance and 10 the highest.

Here is Google’s definition of PageRank:

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 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”.

Put simply, the more hyperlinks there are to a page the more important Google considers a page. Links from important pages count for more than links from less important pages.

In theory, if two web pages contain the words “mysterious algorithm” and a user searches for this on Google, the page with the higher pagerank will appear higher in the search results.

Historically, Google’s algorithm for assigning a rank to a web page was what distinguished the Google search engine from others such as Yahoo or Alta Vista. Google’s algorithm allowed the rapidly growing number of web pages on the internet to be catalogued and ranked making searches more meaningful to users. In more recent years though, Google has increasingly modified its ranking algorithm to be biased toward to content of webpages rather than the incoming links.

For more information, see PageRank on Wikipedia.

Google PageRank