Article DetailsSeo myths associated with Google PageRank. |
| Date Added: February 08, 2008 09:44:48 AM |
SEO MYTHS ASSOCIATED WITH GOOGLE PAGE RANK.
Google has once again updated its Tool bar Rage Rank sparking a flurry of forum discussions among the web's SEO community. This change has been disconcerting to webmasters who have reported a nose-dive in overall traffic despite increased visibility in the Page Rank tool bar. A cursory visit to many online SEO forums displays many threads questioning the reliability of the new tool bar values. In this piece, I will attempt to address some of the controversial issues raised by these changes:. 1. Is 0 to 10 a true page rank value? The studies we have conducted show that quite a significant number of people are of the premise that Page Rank is an integer number or at least it converges to an integer. After intensive testing however, we have arrived at the conclusion that page rank is actually a floating point number. Google arrives at your site's page rank by rounding up the real value to the closest integer and putting it on the 0-10 scale which is then duly displayed on the tool bar of your browser. 2. The value of the Page Rank displayed on your tool bar is the one used to rank the results. You may have recently noticed that the page rank value displayed on your tool bar is updated once every few months without any regular interval in between. Presently, Google's calculations continuously cause the Page Rank and the tool bar values to differ. The page rank value displayed on the tool bar should not be considered current but as a level that has been reached by your page by the time of the latest tool bar update. 3. Search Results are ranked primarily by Page Rank. This is a misconception. Although, Page Rank previously formed the backbone of Google's success as a search engine behemoth mainly because of its integrity, there were instances where that integrity was abused as far web and hyper-links are concerned. There was wide belief that Google operated the most uniquely democratic search result system. But in the recent years, the sophistication of Google's algorithm technology has increased. Now Google uses more than one tool to deliver search results. Some of the techniques employed are specific to the keyword query submitted. For example, Google monitors the page copy for keyword saturation and back links’ anchor text. Other search methods are domain specific, specifically, the age of the domain name, what keywords make up the domain name, and of course the Page Rank. The actual weight factor used to determine the page rank is one of Google's closely-guarded trade secrets. In actuality it is now quite possible that Page Rank is no longer the primary way Google serves search results. 4. My traffic will skyrocket if the Google toolbar displays an increase of PageRank for my pages. This is another misconception. One will not notice any sudden increase in traffic after upgrading the toolbar. As I mentioned earlier, the continuous updating and calculation by Google of the internal PageRank will gradually adjust the rankings as your pages gain or lose backlinks. This means any upgrades to the toolbar itself will not translate to a corresponding change in search results. 5. The PageRank toolbar is just for entertainment and has no real use. Google representatives insist on this but SEO enthusiasts suspect not. Google has ample reason to hide the true page rank results, namely because of hackers. In recent times, there have been repeated attempts to gain unauthorized access to page rank data with the view of manipulating search results. This has caused Google to react by no longer displaying the updated toolbar values. Today, one should not bet everything on the results of the toolbar even though it still remains the easiest and most obvious way for millions of web users to evaluate the quality of a page. |
