Webcliq Rant Technology, Communications and Marketing on Mallorca

Should I worry about my pages’ toolbar PageRank?

There are two kinds of Google PageRank – the actual PageRank that is a part of the ranking algorithm, and the toolbar PageRank that is updated from time to time and is aimed to provide webmasters with a general idea of the actual PageRank of the webpage.

The actual PageRank is one of 200+ factors that influence webpage’s ranking, it is constantly recalculated. Lately, its importance has decreased even more seriously. Susan Moskwa, a Google Employee has informed webmasters :

“We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it [from Google Webmaster Tools] because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it. “

Unique content, inbound links from relevant, authoritative sites, keyword-rich link text, and good neighborhood are the things that will influence your site rankings, and not the toolbar PageRank.

Should I use PageRank sculpting?

PageRank sculpting is a method of managing link juice flow by using a rel=”nofollow” link attribute and/or by organizing your non-priority pages for SERP’s in an external include file blocked with your robots.txt. All these are done to prevent your site link juice from being passed to untrustworthy sites that may create bad neighborhood or to secondary, unimportant internal pages.

“The notion of “PageRank sculpting” has always been a second- or third-order recommendation for us. – says Matt Cutts in his post about PageRank sculpting, – I would recommend the first-order things to pay attention to are 1) making great content that will attract links in the first place, and 2) choosing a site architecture that makes your site usable/crawlable for humans and search engines alike.” Things like intuitive navigation, user- and search-engine-friendly URLs are easily and successfully managed by webmasters rather than manipulating crawl prioritization.

Will external linking reduce the Google PageRank of my pages?

One SEO myth says that outbound links without the rel=”nofollow” attribute decrease Google PageRank of the page. Like the majority of the myths, this is untrue.

Webpages’ PageRank is affected only by quantity and quality of inbound links, not the outbound links. In the same way that Google trusts sites less when they link to spammy sites or bad neighborhoods, parts of the Google system encourage links to good sites. But you should remember that your page may be marked as spam and deindexed, if you place 1000 links on it or link to bad neighborhoods. But this has nothing to do with Google PageRank which will stay intact.

Another myth says that the more outbound links you mark with the rel=”nofollow” attribute, the more link juice will stay within your site and flow to other links, which is good if the links are internal. However, Google has changed the PR flow rules in the past year, and even though you may forbid a Googlebot to follow all the outbound links on your page, its PR will be divided among all the outbound and internal links and the link juice won’t stay.

So, if you are afraid of linking to an external site because your PageRank may decrease or your site may drop some link juice, forget this and go ahead and link to valuable relevant pages.

SEO Experiment – Is Page Rank Still A Ranking Factor?

Three years ago we tested if Google PageRank was correlating with the page’s position and pages with high Google PageRank were ranked higher on Google SERPs. The result was more than convincing: for any given keyword – be it popular or not – the average PageRank of the top 10 pages was always greater than the average PageRank of the next 11-20 pages, and so on. We didn’t find much exception from that rule. This time we’ve tried to remake the test and check if PageRank is an important ranking factor.

We assume that, in principle, the lower a page is in search results, the lower toolbar PageRank number it has – at least this rule remains as a general trend. So, we’ve requested results for some very popular and unpopular key phrases and checked the average PageRank of the 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th “10-position” results pages.

In detail: with the help of the Google Adwords Keyword tool, we have carefully selected 450 keywords (the 250 most competitive and the 200 least competitive) belonging to a few popular topics – real estate, vacation rentals, job search, and cooking recipes. We queried Google for these keywords and got 2250 webpages, retrieved PR for each webpage on the top five results pages, and then found an average PR for each of the five SERPs.

The results prove that the general trend remains only for large amounts of keywords, i.e. the PageRank simple average of 50-60 words gradually decreases from 1st to 2nd, from 2nd to 3rd and so on up to 5th page. However, on the single key phrase level, among all the keywords (popular and unpopular alike), only 22 key phrases out of 450 have an uninterrupted decreasing trend.

What does it mean? Google guys and girls were right, high PR is not all you need for your site’s success in terms of link popularity, and on-the-page factors now matter more than three years ago. PageRank is still a ranking factor, but its role is not as significant as many webmasters think. High PageRank is good proof that you have an established site, but is a doubtful traffic driver.