Google page rank – is it here to stay?
Posted by Katia Pereria on 30 Aug 2007 at 11:15 am | Tagged as: Link Development, Search Engine News
PageRank (PR) is the method used by Google to rank web pages. This method “independently” weighs links to your site’s pages from other pages on the internet. If you have the Google Tool Bar you can access PR.
This is the heart of Goggles software, it is a system developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google. PageRank plays a central role in many of Goggle’s web search tools.
In their Stanford University paper; The Anatomy of a Search Engine, Sergey and Larry speak about how academic citation literature has been applied to the web. By counting citations or backlinks to a given page, it gives some approximation of a page’s importance or quality. PageRank extends this idea by not counting links from all pages equally but by the number of links on a page.
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 analyses 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.
Jonathan Dingman from Google Inside states that there has been a lot of debate among the SEOs and the search industry about whether or not PageRank is here to stay or not. The idea behind PageRank has created a huge market for the search industry. Buying, selling, and marketing text links to manipulate the search results.
Adam Lasnik says that PageRank continues to be one of many important signals for Google. They are always refining how they crawl, index, and rank webpage’s… but PageRank is expected to be around in one form or another for the foreseeable future.
The good news is that Google isn’t wholly dependent on PageRank, it’s simply one of the many factors of Google search.
Therefore, Page rank is not what is most important to be measuring on a daily or monthly basis. There are too many other factors more worthy of your valuable time such as domain age, keyword use in title tags, global link popularity, page titles etc.
