The topic of PageRank comes up more and more in our dialogue with new potential clients and current clients, so we felt the need to provide an overview of what it is, how it works, and what Google has to say about its relevance and use today. PageRank is a trademarked, rating provided by Google to pages of websites. This rating can potentially be given to each page of a website, and ratings are on a scale from 0 to 10. PageRank is displayed for a page on a site in the Google Toolbar. You must have the Google Toolbar installed to see PageRank for any given page on a site. Here, we will explain how, in our opinion, some business owners have spent too much energy in trying to get a higher PageRank thinking that it will somehow affect the overall Search Engine Ranking for highly searched SEO Keywords.

PageRank is determined for pages on a site by a special algorithm that analyzes the amount and quality of sites that link to a particular page of a site. For instance, let's say you have a news site, and another highly trafficked news site (that has a PageRank of 6) decides to link to your homepage, for example. Then, your homepage's PageRank will factor that link in, along with the importance of the site linking to you (determined by how much traffic and links it has going to it), and will use this information to calculate a PageRank for that homepage to which it is being linked. A site linking to you that you reciprocally link back to does not factor very much into your PageRank because, essentially, all you are saying to Google is "we decided to link to one another." The above example of the news site solely linking to your homepage without your linking back shows Google that your site is important enough for a widely visited news site to link to you to provide information. Some wrongly believe that PageRank is a rating assigned to an entire website and if you can get your PageRank number up, then you can expect to see higher rankings on the search engines. While this is not the case at all, it is easy to see how this wrong assumption was made. In short, some aspects that are factored into your PageRank rating also factor into the Search Engine Ranking algorithms and we suppose this is how the incorrect assumptions related to the topic started.

When they become a part of common industry knowledge, assumptions based on misinformation can spawns scam companies and those that are uneducated to scramble to capitalize on the concept. This is what happened with PageRank. There are Search Engine Optimization companies, most of which are not reputable, that have made PageRank a focus of their Search Engine Optimization recommendations and packages. The greater misinformed public hears a fancy word called PageRank and the other jargon that these types of companies spout and begins to wrongly believe that PageRank is somehow important to them. So if PageRank is not important to most companies and their websites, or should not be, then for whom is it important? Some advertising companies that receive a great deal of their income from selling advertising on a particular page of a site might concern themselves with the PageRank for the page of the site on which they are selling advertising. Really, though, even for these companies it is definitely not the most important part of Search Engine Optimization that they should be concerned with. The only companies making large amounts of money by concerning themselves with PageRank are companies that are selling expensive, scam-type links from a site with a higher PageRank to a smaller site that probably only wishes to get more traffic, higher SEO Ranking, and a bit more business from their website. As with most other things that are done to fool or trick Google, Google does not like this, and you probably will not be rewarded with higher rankings by spending this money.

In recent months, Google has put in place measures to deter people from obsessing over PageRank, as they were bombarded most of last year with questions from business owners that simply did not understand that PageRank does not affect SEO Ranking at all. They have begun calculating and changing PageRanks for pages on sites less frequently (whereas they used to update more often), and for some pages, they have simply erased their PageRank that they previously had focused to achieve. In April 2009, in response to a person in the Google Webmaster Central forum who asked why their PageRank on a site had been reduced to nil, Google employee John Nu wrote, "Don't worry. In fact, don't bother thinking about it. We only update the PageRank displayed in Google Toolbar a few times a year; this is our respectful hint for you to worry less about PageRank, which is just one of over 200 signals that can affect how your site is crawled, indexed and ranked." Also, as late as October 2009, another Google employee, Susan Moskwa, had related that the company had removed PageRank completely from its Webmaster Tools section of Google that companies such as ours use to communicate information to Google. While the PageRank element has not been removed from the latest version of the Google Toolbar software, we expect to see it removed when Google releases a newer version.

Most can now understand what Search Engine Optimization is and the concept of having a site rank for potentially searched keywords related to the industry or business; however, when they see a "rating" denoted, it is hard to get people to simply dismiss it, hence the questions and concerns. We hope that this article dispels any rumors that you may have been told or been lead to believe. As always, feel free to contact us for more information on our SEO Hosting Web Design services and the ways in which we can help you get more business out of your website. We have been in business as a SEO Web Design Company for over 12 years and come highly recommended by the clients that we work with.