PageRank (PR) is a quality index invented by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. According to this purely Google reference, values from 0 to 10 determine the “importance” of a page, its “reliability” and its “notoriety” on the web.
This evaluation does not have a direct impact on the search engine rankings of a website. For the same keyword, a PR 1 site may rank on the first page of search results, while a PR 6 site will be found much further away.
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PageRank “old version” before 2014:
The Page Rank Scale
- Google has long used the PR of sites to determine their position in search results.
- PR was once one of the main ranking factors for a website.
- Getting links from pages on a site with a high PR was considered the best way to increase the PR of another page.
- It was easy to manipulate and skew the PR of a web page by buying links from other sites with high PR.
Notion of PR in 2015:
It is now only one of the “200 parameters” of the Google algorithm that determines the popularity of a page and its positioning.
It is no longer a determining factor for the ranking of a web page in the search engine. Yet, a page’s position in the SERPs(1) can be indirectly affected by the PR of a link pointing to that page.
Links with a high PR pointing to a page, a site, still weigh as much as ever to improve its notoriety, but they must be relevant. A link from a website with a PR 7, but relating to a very different theme from the site being pointed to, does not necessarily strengthen its position in the SERPs. (Although…)
Acquiring high-PR links in an unnatural way can penalize your website.
Nothing new in the tropics of Quebec, SEO specialists know enough about the algorithm that determines Google PageRank, they follow the evolution of website optimization techniques and they wonder less and less if a high PR is so effective for its positioning today.
This article (inspired by Boris Demaria’s) tends to put some myths on this subject in their place.
Reminders
PR is a logarithmic calculation of various links that point to your site, showing its reliability and logic. The difference between a PR 4 and a PR 5 is five to ten times greater than the difference between a PR 2 and a PR 3.
You are likely to find 100 times more PR 2 pages than PR 4 pages on the web. If your homepage is ranked in PR 6, it is among a fraction of 0.1% of websites, which means a lot of awareness for your site.
Each page has its own PR, the one on the main page is often higher than that of the internal pages (but not always, an internal page can acquire its own notoriety). When you go to look for a link in a PR5 directory, be sure that the page of your description will be and will probably remain PR0 for a long time.
The PR is transmitted divided in proportion to the number of links leaving the page
PR is transmitted from one page to another, which is why internal linking is so important. However, I consider that today the work of sculpting internal Page Rank is a waste of time and I prefer to favor the quality of content whose future remains bright.
The PR is not an essential ranking factor:
The calculation of PR is often bizarre, seems inaccurate, over- or underestimated…
If you pick up the PR of websites on the first page of Google search results, you’ll find many sites with low PR in front of stronger PRs.
- The Google Caffeine update(2) made this possible by promoting fresh content in search results.
- The 2012 and 2013 updates (Panda and Penguin), the basis of the new humingbird algorithm, first look for and evaluate the quality of a page’s content as the main ranking factor, leaving aside the PR index.
The reasons why a website’s PR remains relevant are as follows:
PageRank is still one of the “200 criteria” used by Google.
While Matt Cutts officially communicates that there will be no more Page Rank updates, there will be a general update in December 2013.
If two sites have very similar content in terms of onpage quality, but with different PRs, the site with a high PR will position itself ahead in the search results.
This is a good reason not to abandon the notion of RP.
Recent content (without PageRank) can quite easily reach a high rank (index freshness). After a period of time, the position of this content may be adjusted and the site replaced by another with content deemed more relevant or better linked . (See the case study by Mahesh Mohan, a technology specialist on this.)
High PR backlinks are highly influential if they are relevant and natural.
Bloggers generally prefer to publish on sites with a high PR, but we should not neglect pages with a PR 0… because they could gain notoriety over time.
Once you have obtained a correct PR you will be asked for link exchanges.
Some bloggers sell links on their high-PR blogs, it’s often expensive, illegal for Google, and risky in the long run.
The only really good reason that should make you worry about your PR
is to gain some credibility for your site and not to gain a higher Google ranking. There are no easy solutions to increase a PR:
- a mix of strategies to strengthen quality connections,
- quality content and user-generated updates (via blog and comments),
- a good structure and management of internal links,
- Targeted links to your internal pages.
- good site velocity,
- good ergonomics and presentation of the site
- a presence on social networks.
This set of parameters helps improve your PageRank. The main criterion remains the acquisition of links (net linking or backlinking). Search engines consider the link pointing to your site as a vote, a recommendation for your content and determine its popularity.
Definitions
(1) SERP is the search engine results page (SERP), which is automatically generated based on keywords entered by an Internet user. This page is a set of links to indexed resources that Google considers relevant to its internal ranking system.
Caffeïne is a major update. It concerns crawling and indexing, in particular the “freshness of indexing.