3 Page Rank myths explained

Posted on December 15th, 2011. Written by Andrei.

1. Page rank is decesive in the position a site has in searches

It should be explained here. I think much of the confusion comes from the description given by Google for the Page Rank technology, which says that „Page Rank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.”

I think it’s a little imprudent from google to call also call the same the technology behind site ranking, as indicative value of the toolbar. The Page Rank at which Google referres here is what in the SEO world is known as „page trust”, namely a number of factors which influence how well a page is viewes by Google and how high will ocur after the keyword matching (which is related to the relevance of the respective page, for a particular search).

So, don’t make a confusion between toolbar PR and the trust given a page. The trust is crucial in the position a site will have in searches, while the toolbar PR won’t be.

2. Page Rank doesn’t matter at all in the page ranking algorithm

Let’s be not so critical, as long as we don’t know anything concrete about how the PR of a page affects his ranking in search engines. I’d bet 100$ that from the 500 million variables about which Google speakes, one of them, with little importance, is the toolbar PR, but I don’t think it has such a big value so that we need to struggle to raise the PR only for the love of raising it. Along with bringing solid links, from quality sites, the toolbar PR will grow anyway. We can link to two clues to determine if this myth is true or not:

a)      In 2007, when the toolbar PR of many sites which were selling links dropped dramatically, there wasn’t an overall drop in the SERPs of those sites. From this, we conclude that if the PR really matters in the ranking algorithm, it matters very little.

b)      The most competitive search results of the first pages have high PR. True, it’s a constant factor, but the fact that the pages have a high PR  is rather a side effect of the large number of inbound links and increased quality of the link profiles of the respective sites.

3. Page Rank determines how a page ranks

It is rather like a pun, which caused confusion among webmasters: The term „Page” from Page Rank comes from the creator of the algorithm and also, one of the co-founders of Google, Larry Page, not from the common noun „page”. In any case, it is not the toolbar PR the one which determines how and on what position a site appears in searches, but a combination of the trust of the site (also called by Google Page Rank) and the mechanism of keyword-matching

Andrei

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