The Google Pagerank is a tool developed by Google that determines the importance of your website / webpage with relation to the search requested by the users. It is a value represented by a whole number between1 – 10. Higher the Google pagerank for a website, greater the chances of that website appearing at the top in a web search.
Principle behind Google PageRank
The Google Pagerank functions on the principle of link analysis algorithm. The link analysis algorithm assigns a numerical weight to each element within a set based on its relative importance in the set. In this particular context, it refers to the links that a webpage has managed to acquire.
Web page Links
- Google Pagerank is determined by the number of links that a website gets. These links may be considered as recommendations by other web users and web masters. The web links generally indicate that the content was relevant and of high quality. Naturally, greater the number of links the website gets, higher is the pagerank for the website.
- While considering links for websites, the quality of the links is also given due weightage. For instance, if your website deals with home furnishing, a link from a reputed interior and home decoration magazine’s website will carry more weight than a link from a customer’s blog.
Google Pagerank – Unpredictable?
In recent times, the effectiveness of Google Pagerank has reduced considerably. The tool has become unpredictable for a variety of reasons.
- The importance of keywords in online marketing is far surpassing that of Pagerank. Keywords are not restricted to commonly used single words, but are more complex, multi word phrases specific to the product or industry that the website deals in. Many websites find that their pages containing specific product related keywords, but having lower pagerank perform better in searches as compared to the home page that may have a higher pagerank.
- There is nothing original, fresh content to impress search engines. Often blogs containing relevant updated information come up high on search engine results within minutes of posting. Obviously they have not yet had time to gather any links, so their pagerank is low. Yet their visibility is high because of the updated content. Because of this, blogging is emerging as an effective online marketing tool, used by many companies.
- Some companies offer to sell high quality links to webmasters in an effort to boost the Google Pagerank. This includes links from pages that have a high pagerank themselves. Such a strategy is nothing but false creation or manipulation of pagerank, which gives distorted picture of the relevance of that website for the information sought.
- Certain websites that provide software or services require mandatory links from their clients at least for a temporary period. In such a case, the Google Pagerank for the website will shoot up for the period and this has nothing to do with quality or relevance of content on the website.
Google Pagerank appears to be on its way out. So if your website has a low Google pagerank, it means little or nothing for the online marketing for your business.
This article is written by Prateek. He is the founder and tech-writer with SEOEXCEED. He dedicates SEO knowledge. Recently he is coming up with a series of articles related to basics of SEO.