JLH Design Blog

If you frequent webmaster forums, discussion groups, or blogs, you’ll more than likely see post after post, and question after question regarding PageRank (PR). For those who don’t know PageRank is the little green bar up in your google tool bar that “is Google’s measure of the importance of this page.” The scale is a simple 11 number 0 through 10. Being that its the only visible indicator from Google it’s often obsessed about.

For a discussion about PageRank, we first need to look at the definition by Google.

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.”

Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

Top 13 things that won’t effect your PageRank

Though that seems to sum it up pretty good, often I still see numerous questions regarding a sites page rank going up or down. To start with let’s cover some common elements that have ABSOLUTELY NOTHING to do with a pages PR calculation.

1. Content
William Shakespeare himself could come back to life and write for your site and Google’s page ranking won’t give you one point for the quality of your content. You can spend 20 hours a day for 5 years writing thousands and thousands of unique, highly relevant, beautiful pages and your PageRank will not change. Conversely you can have blank pages and your PageRank will not change.
2. Titles
Changing your page titles from all just the name of the site to a unique description of each page will not improve your PageRank. Erasing all of your titles will not decrease your PageRank
3. Description
Including a highly detailed and extremely accurate description of your page will not affect your PageRank, if on the other hand you accidentally remove all your descriptions and replace them with the number “7″, your PageRank will not suffer.
4. Keywords
Whether you use META keywords on your page or not, or your keywords are stuffed, rotten, or totally irrelevant has nothing to do with PageRank.
5. Google Adwords, Adsense, Analytics
The use of any of Google’s other services including AdWords, AdSensse, or Analytics has nothing to do with PageRank. Whether you spend million dollars a day with AdWords, receive a million dollars a day from Adsense, or check your stats every 10 minutes, has absolutely nothing to do with your PageRank.
6. Sitemaps
Using Google’s webmaster tools and submitting a sitemap or unsubmitting one will not effect your PageRank.
7. Sitemap Errors
If Google’s webmaster tools show you have no errors or 500 errors in your sitemap, your PageRank will not be hurt or helped.
8. Server Problems
If your server goes down for a week or has never been down since Al Gore invented the internet , your PageRank will remain the same.
9. Competitors
Your competitors use of sneaky redirects, hidden text, adwords, sitemaps, the color green, linking scheme, SEO budget, cloaking, affiliate links, or page rank will have no effect on your PageRank.
10. Robots.txt
Having or not having a robots.txt that works or doesn’t work will not help or hurt your PageRank. You can block Google from your site entirely and you will still get PageRank.
11. Duplicate Content
Whether you write all of your own content, have a scraper write it, someone else copies it, publish the same page 500 times, your PageRank will not be harmed or icreased.
12. Age of Domain
If you just bought your domain or got it from Al Gore back in the seventies, it has no bearing on your PageRank.
13. Images/Flash/Java/CSS
You may have the ugliest site in the world or the most beautiful flash laden java enabled page with pictures taken by a professional photographer and it will have no effect on your PageRank.

The point is that only the links and the quality of the links is considered in your PageRank calculation, that’s it, nothing else. All of the above items may help get you links which will increase your PageRank, but they will not be considered in the calculation. You may find an old crappy site that doesn’t have any links but has high PageRank, but you have to consider that that link may have been there for 10 years.

PageRank Factors

Now that we’ve got what doesn’t count out of the way, let’s consider the remaining factors that do.

1. Quantity of links
Of course any calculation must consider the shear quantity of links. More links is better than less links. Less links is worse than more links.
2. Quality of links
Links from higher ranking pages are given more weight than lower ranking pages.

Unknowns

Most often when one asks, “what happened to my page rank?” or “why don’t I have any PageRank?” it is because of these unknowns.

1. What is a link?
We don’t know exactly what Google considers a good link. Some sites that link may have had their link power taken away. Other links like NOFOLLOW links don’t carry any weight. Even in the webmaster tools the links shown may not carry any weight. Using Yahoo’s site explorer to find links to your site has nothing to do with what Google considers.
2. The calculation
If we definitively knew what links Google considered we still don’t know how they calculate how much weight each one passes on. It has to have something to do with the page rank of the linking page, the quantity of links on that page, and other factors but the exact calculation is unknown.
3. Internal PageRank
The page rank you see in the tool bar is not updated often, only a few times a year and even then pretty poorly. If you check multiple data centers you will see that even Google isn’t on the same page as to what a page PageRank is. The internal PageRank however is a continuous function that’s updated while they crawl and index the web.
4. The Scale
There are a few billion more pages today than there were in 1998 when this whole page rank mess yet it is still ranked 0 through 10. Back in 1998 maybe you only needed 100 links to get to a page rank of 6, but today you may need 10,000 links. As the size of the web grows the threshold for the next level in PageRank changes.

Conclusion

PageRank is simply a calculation based on the quantity and quality of links that Google considers to a page. The exact calculation is unknown (to us outsiders) and is ever changing. Most important however to know is that a page with page rank of 2 can and will outrank a page with a PageRank of 6 in a search results page. Given that simple fact, if you’ve read to the bottom of this page then you’ve spent too much time already thinking about PageRank, spend more time with the basics like making sure it’s crawlable.

Update2/14/07

In response to Monika M’s comment below I thought I’d show an example of a lower PageRank page, outranking a higher page. There’s a great little Firefox extension for SEO by Aaron Wall that will let you see the PageRank and other important data about a page right in the search results. Using this extension turned on I ran a search for “webmaster” on google. You will notice that the #1 spot is a page rank of 6, outranking the #2 which is google itself at #9.

Regarding the second part of your comment, I think non-reciprocated links are probably the BEST link you can get pointing to you, it helps define the site as an authority. Think of the great page ranked sites out there with millions of links TO them and very few that are reciprocated (Ebay, CNN, Amazon, etc) . I wouldn’t lump all reciprocated links as bad however, if the two sites relate to each other than it’s a good thing. If you’re selling jewelry and De Beers links to you on the their home page, I wouldn’t be afraid to mention it on your site. Who links to you, as well as who you link to helps establish your keywords that your site will rank for, along with on-page content. It’s this simple fact that was taken advantage of when people started Google Bombing. If a site is on a related theme that you are, linking to them will help your site. This is why reciprocal linking just for the sake of getting a link is usually bad if off topic. Unless you really want to rank for “Free Ringtones” or “Cheap Mortgages” having them link to you and you linking to them is only bound to take your sites theme off course. That being said, don’t forget that there is virtually nothing anyone can do external to your site to harm your rankings. So if you find a bunch of links from some off topic site to yours, it’s not going to hurt you, as soon as you link to them however you’ve joined their “neighborhood” which may not be so much of a good thing.