Well it’s true and it’s false at the same time. When Sergey Brin and Larry Page changed the search world by introducing the evaluation of links as an additional and important component of the search equation, the core of the new Google concept was something called ‘PageRank’.
In the nineteen nineties there were still relatively few web-pages on the internet compared with today’s near trillion documents. But even then it was becoming increasingly harder to rank documents which, even after assessment with the available text and keyword based algorithms, left too many documents with potential top 10 status.
They conceived of an addition to the common text-based algorithms that would evaluate links into a web-page as a way of quantifying un-reciprocated links or ‘citations’ as they were viewed. They argued that if web users find a document to be useful they will link into it, a form of vote, with PageRank being almost a popularity contest. It’s where we get the phrase link-popularity. Thus PageRank was born. Actually named after Larry Page, and not because of its connection with web-pages.
PageRank became one of the most important factors that are added together, to form the final ranking of a web page. It immediately separated out Google from the pack. Not because web users understood the complicated mathematics behind the formula but simply because the results were consistently better. By adding into the equation an understanding of who was voting for that web-page it was now easier to differentiate between otherwise similar pages at a keyword level, in a way that purely text based algorithms were unable to compete with.
Over the years PageRank has become increasingly sophisticated and increasingly a target for impatient search engine optimisation specialists attempting to short-circuit it in any number of ingenious but ultimately doomed ways.
One often forgotten but important aspect of how PageRank works is that introduces the concept of ageing. Content can appear over-night. But links can take a long time to develop. Automatically then, Google had an additional weapon in its armoury. Sites would not rank until they had been around for long enough to develop a number of links, or put another way, an amount of communal approval. The concept of the Google ‘sandbox’ was born to explain why new sites never appeared in the Google rankings with the speed with which they appeared in other search engines.
In its most simple form PageRank analyses all the inbound links into a page and the PageRanks of those in-linking pages. The more PageRank ‘juice’ that flows into that page from the in-linking pages, the higher the PageRank of the page.
Over the years the endless material has been written about PageRank and its increasing or decreasing relevance to web site rankings. Billions of links have been bought and sold and whole organisations have grown up around selling and creating links.
But here is the thing. In all that activity we forgot one salient point. Google is only trying to present the very best sites to searchers, and PageRank and the evaluation of links to gain an understanding of how a web-community views a page, is still only another measure of the quality of your content.
When Google looks at your content, it is simply asking, who out there rates this page? It’s an indirect measure of quality or importance of the content.
So PageRank is really about content not links. Content is still king.
The point is, that if your content is good enough the site will acquire links on its own. The PageRank, rankings and ultimately traffic will happen anyway. Think of the best sites in the world that we all visit. Did they ever spend a single penny on link-building?
Of course not everyone is lucky enough to have inspirational content on a global scale and there will always be a role for high quality article writing and link-building but we mustn’t get obsessed by links in the way that we have, and we must spend as much time as possible creating high-quality, informative, educational, unique content.
References
Anatomy of a hypertextual search engine
Google Patent
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