Ramblings About SEO

Page Rank gets a bad rap sometimes. It’s easy to understand why. People got obsessed with Page Rank a few years back, and for a long time, people would not let go of the notion that Page Rank was the only thing you needed to worry about in SEO. For that reason, many really smart SEOs started to downplay it greatly, and to suggest that Page Rank is meaningless.

But that’s over doing it. Page Rank is still very, very important, and I still use it.

Page Rank still provides the best way of measuring the importance of a page, or a site. So let’s step back for a minute and talk about what I mean by importance. For example, why is Amazon more highly ranked than Joe’s Book Store? Because Amazon has a lot more links (page rank). Ultimately, a search engine has to decide two things about each page, in response to each search query:

1. How relevant is the page to the search query – they do this by textual analysis of the page, the site, and an analysis of the relevance of the inbound links (by analyzing the text on the linking page, and the text on the linking site, and the relevance of the links to the linking site). As you can see, this rapidly becomes a highly recursive process, that provides the best results if you do this on a search query by search query basis. You can think of every page on the web as having its own “relevance score” with respect to every single search query.
2. How important the page is compared to other pages that are relevant to the search query – This is a page rank calculation, as filtered by the relevance of the inbound links. I think of this as “query specific page rank”. So if the query is “bananas”, and your page is about bananas, and you have an inbound link from a site about selling used cars, that link will not add very much to the importance score of your page for the query bananas. But if the inbound link is from a page about bananas, on a site about bananas, and uses the word bananas in the anchor text of the link, the inbound link will add a tremendous amount to the importance score of your page. The final kicker is an evaluation of the importance of the linking page and the linking site. One simple way to do that is to look at their page rank. To get really artful though, look at how it ranks in the SERPs for the query bananas. If it’s on the first page, you have a killer link. So with this notion of query specific page rank, you have a way of thinking about your linking strategy, and you are acknowledging that page rank is still at the core of that strategy

In SEOmoz’s Search Engine Ranking Factors survey of top SEOs, the top 3 ranking factors selected were:

1. Keyword Use in Title Tag
2. Anchor Text of Inbound Link
3. Global Link Popularity of Site
4. Age of Site
5. Link Popularity within the Site’s Internal Link Structure
6. Topical Relevance of Inbound Links to Site
7. Link Popularity of Site in Topical Community
8. Keyword Use in Body Text
9. Global Link Popularity of Linking Site
10. Rate of New Inbound Links to Site

Looking at this list, and our notion of “Query Specific Page Rank”, items 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 9, and 10 all fall into that category. That’s 7 out of 10 – not too shabby.

So, ultimately, page rank still counts for a lot. And when you adapt that thinking to thinking about Query Specific Page Rank, and relating it to the most important keywords for your site, you are really on the right track with your SEO strategy.

Matt Cutts did another update on Page Rank recently. This started the usual fire storm of questions related to Page Rank, and blog posts by others. One excellent post on the topic was made by Jim Boykin.

Jim makes the point that Page Rank has minimal direct impact in rankings. There are two things that Page Rank influences directly:

1. Crawl Order – Google crawls the web in top down Page Rank order.
2. Crawl Depth – Google allocates more “crawl budget” to higher Page Rank sites.

So Matt and Jim are right. Obsessing about page rank is a waste of time. It’s like checking the level of oil on your oil tank when you are really interested in knowing how warm it is in the house. Doesn’t help you.

However, I completely understand people’s interest in Page Rank. Smart business people set up systems for measuring their business. A former boss of mine used to refer to these as “dials and gages”. Measuring your business is a crucial part of running it well.

In the webmaster business, understanding how you are doing with Google is basic to long term success. After all Google has 50% or more market share, depending on which month’s reports you read. People want to know how they are doing with Google. And Page Rank is a very public gage of your Google progress.

So go ahead and look at your Page Rank. We do. However, don’t spend more than a few seconds a month on it. It’s a very crude measure of your progress with Google, and it does not directly influence rankings.

Spend your quality time examining your stats and logs to see the how people are coming to your site today. This will give you a very meaningful measurement of your progress with all the search engines (e.g. traffic, pages crawled, keywords used). If you don’t have a good stats package, then get one. It’s worth its weight in gold.

Spend your time analyzing who is linking to you, and how you can entice other people to link to you that will directly influence your rankings. Assuming a properly structured site with good content, links are the currency of improved rankings. This means learning how to identify the right links to improve your rankings, instead of getting links to improve your page rank. These are very different things.

Look at these two sets of metrics to make money. This is how the big money is made on the web. Look at Google Page Rank to get a warm fuzzy feeling whenever it goes up. This is how you get … well … warm fuzzy feelings.