Understanding PageRank in relation to Relevancy or Rankings?

Some people seem to believe that PageRank has direct relationship with Google's Relevancy, but it doesn't. That was perhaps correct in the past, but today following impending IPO of Google, it has changed its algorithm in such as way that it will always remain a mystery to SEM. One would be quite right to say that PageRank today is just a small factor in the Google search algorithm.

Currently the biggest factor in Google's search relevancy is getting many keyword rich links from a large variety of C block IP addresses. Getting a bunch of links from a single source is easy. Getting links from many different sources is much difficult and expensive.

Why was it that People made such a BIG Deal out of PageRank?

When your site is new you will have a PageRank of 0. After you get a few links in about a month or two you will see your PageRank go up and it is usually one of your first signs of SEO progress. People see that and as they continue to work they associate their improved rankings with the improved PageRank.

Since PageRank is one of only a few visual signs of SEO progress (the others being inbound links and actual rankings) and it is often easier to get a mid ranged PageRank than it is to get strong rankings many people place too much focus on PageRank.

The fact that many people are selling links, the industrial term of "link broker" where prices of such links are priced according to PageRanking. It inevitably creates an environment where people begin to associate good ranking with PageRank.

How Search Engines Work

Search engines profess to provide relevant results to the searcher. It seeks to place the most relevant results at the top and these results are and should not necessarily the most optimized pages with the most links. Unfortunately, pages and sites are optimized simply to to deceive search engines into thinking the sites and pages are of greater quality and value than they actually are.

As webmasters learn more about search algorithms the algorithms are required to evolve. As you and I learn more about how Google works the relevancy of their search results decline. There is the mysterious factor in the value of Search Engines.

Google likes the fact that many people focus on PageRank because in doing so people are missing the bigger picture: PageRank is not that important anymore.

Why PageRank is Not Important

Tons of people know about PageRank because it is an extremely simple concept to understand. Google is not going to go public as a company worth billions of dollars because they rely heavily upon a system that is easy for anyone to manipulate.

What makes a search engine valuable is not what you know and can manipulate, but the things you do not know about. New filters, clustering technologies, semantic grading of pages, and the fact that Google can change to heavily integrate any of these new technologies into their algorithm at any time is what keeps webmasters on their toes. The knowledge to be able to continually make better technologies work is what makes Google valuable.

How Easy is it to Manipulate PageRank?

Yeap! It is easy (if you believe this to be so). Lets say I have a PR9 website, and I decide to create another site and link to it from all the pages on my current website then my new site would automatically get at least a PR9 or better.

The question is "If the answer to PR is so easy and why is it most industries only have a PR5 or PR6 site as the top ranking result. If PageRank were the primary driving factor behind the Google search algorithm I could dominate a new industry every month without investing much money. Google doesn't want that. Would you agree?

That's what make Google valuable and fortunately or unfortunately (depends on how you see it) makes our lives much more challenging and exciting or more difficult and frustrating.

See you in the next article .... more about Google

Ardelle Sullivan - (NYC) - New York WebStar