There may be over 200 factors (
REF _Ref293978956 \h Figure 66Figure 67
Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 67
“PageRank XE "PageRank:how it is calculated" is this”:-
· It’s the number of people that link to you.
· How important those links are.
Suppose you have a buddy from college and you both have a blog. Suppose you have 10 links pointing to your blog and your buddy has 20 links. Who has more PageRank? What if your 10 links are the New York Times, the LA Times, Reader’s Digest, CNN and his 20 links are all his buddies from College.
So PageRank is not just getting as many links as you
can – please give me links – I have to have more links. No – it’s also how
important they are ( REF _Ref293979065 \h
Figure 68
Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 68
These are links coming into one page. Let us say you have PageRank 9 – let us say 9 in an abstract sense and you have three outgoing links. You more or less divide that 9 by 3 and the 3 goes out on each of the outlinks. That is the basic idea behind PageRank.
Look at the top one. This guy’s got a PageRank of a hundred – he’s got a lot of PageRank. And he’s got 2 outlinks. So each of those 2 outlinks – 50 goes to each one of those. That is literally the idea behind PageRank.”
There may be 200 factors in the Google algorithm but the top factor is something called the HomePage PageRank. The author wrote this up in an article in July 2009 and the following month 72 leading experts on SEO agreed that the top factor is the authority of the domain, that is to say the HomePage PageRank. Keyword SEO Pro is the only keyword tool that looks at difficulty in terms of HomePage PageRank. This is discussed in greater detail on Video 15 of this series.
Chapter 12 Why HomePage PageRank is the top Google factor!
Video 3 XE "Video 03:HomePage PageRank #1 factor on Google" (17th March 2010)
PageRank XE "PageRank" and why its significance has been under estimated. Importance of HomePage PageRank – G-Factor-1
The Case For HomePage PageRank in SEO
( REF _Ref293979938 \h
Figure 93
Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 93
XE "Case For PageRank in SEO"
(Please note: These videos work well on Firefox, Google Chrome and SeaMonkey. There may be difficulties with some versions of Internet Explorer. To view the video with Internet Explorer, you may need to download a program from Adobe.)
Larry Page ( REF
_Ref293979967 \h Figure 94
Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 94
Larry Page and PageRank – One of the two Google co-founders
Before Google arrived the search engines looked
at on-page factors only, such as HTML coding, meta keywords, page title and
the number of times the keyword appears on the page. The Google algorithm
incorporates back links from other websites to evaluate the importance of a
web page. Only the inner sanctum at Google knows the full algorithm,
although there is an extensive literature on the subject (
REF _Ref293979990 \h Figure 95
Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 95
I would like to return to the arguments that PageRank has no value in search engine optimisation positioning. There are two arguments.
Firstly, webpages are not sorted in PageRank order. One would have to get into Google's Fort Knox to learn the full algorithm, which incorporates thousands of factors. Only then would we be able to predict positioning correctly. Let me say up front that of course I do not know the full Google algorithm. But even the most knowledgeable are not even close. Let us look at IBP.
Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 96
IBP analysis Score for www.htmlcodetutorial.com – Keyword ‘html codes’ on Google.co.uk (the web)
Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 97
IBP analysis of top 10 pages - Keyword ‘html codes’ on Google.co.uk (the web)
In this research (
REF _Ref293980068 \h Figure 96
Figure 97
Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 98
Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 99
Google’s PageRank Indicator
You will probably know that Google provides a toolbar, which includes a PageRank indicator and this appears as a green bar. If you do not have it, I would suggest that you search for it and download it. It is available for Firefox and Internet Explorer, although it is not available for several other web browsers.
By placing your cursor over the indicator Google
tells us that "PageRank is Google's view of the importance of this page".
The above two websites ( REF _Ref293980167 \h
Figure 98Figure 99Figure 100
Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 100
You have probably realised that I am leading up to revealing G-Factor-1. But I would like to provide you with a couple of opportunities to see if you can pre-empt me.
"PageRank is Google's view of the importance of this page." So how can a page with a PageRank of 0 be in position in 11 for a keyword with 36 million competitor pages?
A second clue: Google states that PageRank is Google's view of the importance of this page but what Google does not tell us is which page's PageRank Google is referring to. This is the web page in position 11 for the highly competitive keyword 'Credit repair', which has 36 million competitor webpages.
Let us now reveal G-Factor-1 for you. Google does not say that it is the PageRank of this page that matters. So what page could they be referring to? Let us peel away the filename and go back to the HomePage.
Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 101
This is the HomePage of this website and Google
tells us that it has a PageRank of 5 ( REF
_Ref293980237 \h Figure 101Figure 102
Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 102
PageRank and How Google works XE "How Google works" . How you can Rank Higher in Google XE "Rank Higher in Google" . (Matt Cutts XE "Matt Cutts" 2009 REF _Ref293980351 \h Figure 103)
(http://www.webuildyourblog.com/965/matt-cutts-google-supremo-wordpress/ )
Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 103
Matt Cutts XE "Matt Cutts:Google's Spokesman" – Heads the scam (Black Hat) detection section at Google.
Matt has a blog and provides videos. It has become apparent that he acts as the face of Google. He tells us that Google gives greater importance to websites with higher PageRank and crawls them more frequently ( REF _Ref293980443 \h Figure 104
Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 104
Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 105
In the above slide, Matt is showing us that if
one page has 100 units of link juice and 2 outbound links, then those two
outbound links have 50 units of link juice. The lower page has 9 units of
incoming link juice and three outbound links; each of the three outgoing
links from this page has 3 units of link juice. Matt tells us that “this is
the literally the idea behind PageRank ( REF
_Ref293980494 \h Figure 105Figure 106
Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 106
Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 107
Becoming more ‘reputable’ relates to off page optimisation – backlinks of quality and ‘relevant’ relates to on-page content ( REF _Ref293980801 \h Figure 107). I would add that the anchor text in backlinks also contributes to confirming that a webpage has valuable content of the keywords in the anchor text.
Matt also recommends using a variety of words that searchers might use to find your page. This is essentially latent semantic indexing XE "latent semantic indexing" .
Google looks at 200 factors. Page title and URL h1 tags do count. Matt advocates putting keywords in the URL. Use dashes in the URL. Dashes are a little better than underScores. If you have pages with URLs with no dashes do not change these filenames – it’s not that important. Do not use the targeted keyword too many times – a few times will suffice.
How do you increase PageRank XE "How do you increase PageRank" ?
Matt asked the question all optimisers ask: How do you get more people linking to you XE "How do you get more people linking to you" ?
Write interesting content and people will put a link to you. The more you write, the greater the chance that someone will link to you. If you write frequent, quality and interesting text people will want to link to you.
Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 108
Matt used the Katamari ( REF _Ref293980821 \h Figure 108) concept to explain his backlinking philosophy. In Katamari, you start by rolling together small items and then add ever bigger items. From an SEO point of view this means start in a small area and expand.
Videos XE "Videos" do relatively well on Google and can attract visitors and backlinks. (35mins.30seconds)
Off-page factors are more important than on-page factors in terms of top positioning on search engine results pages. It is thought that off-page factors may account for up to 80% of the Google algorithm.
I thought we needed to define the relationship between PageRank and the number of backlinks to a page and I therefore undertook an analysis of 500 HomePages. These were obtained on Google for several different countries such as Google.com the United States. Google.co.uk - the United Kingdom and Google.com.au - Australia. I looked at search engine results pages for short- and long-tail keywords.
Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 146
You can determine the number of links for a page on a search engine of your choice by typing into the search box link:www.yourURL.com for the HomePage of the full URL for an internal page eg. link:www.yourURL.com/page.html. I chose AllTheWeb as my preferred search engine. ( REF _Ref294028137 \h Figure 146) (May 2011 – Unfortunately, AllTheWEb have diSEOntinued this facility and I would now use Yahoo.)
You can see that for this website 'Keyword SEO Pro' AllTheWeb knows of 5140 links. For this figure I used Link Popularity Check XE "Link Popularity Check" , a free program provided by Axandra who produce Internet Business Promoter.
Figure SEQ Figure \* ARABIC 147
You can see the different number of links on the different search engines. This is for my website www.2womenshealth.com. AllTheWeb has 5800, Alta Vista 6,080, Google just 16 and Yahoo 4911 ( REF _Ref294028229 \h Figure 147). Google always tends to report very few links and I gather this may be because they only report links from high PageRank pages, probably PageRank 4 and above.
This table ( REF _Ref294028268 \h Table 4) indicates the data obtained from the study. The column on the left indicates PageRank from 1- 9. The second column, the number of pages analysed for each PageRank, the third column the average number of links for each PageRank and the final column the range.
Not surprisingly the average number of backlinks for each PageRank gradually rises as PageRank rises from an average of 77 for PageRank 1 through to more than 10 million for PageRank 9. With a backlinking campaign it should be possible to achieve PageRank 3 which requires an average of 615 links and even PageRank 4 which requires an average of 2,500. However, a PageRank 5 would require 70,000 and gathering links by a link building campaign would therefore be unlikely to achieve such a PageRank.
This data demonstrates two interesting phenomena:
1. There is a very large range for each PageRank of the number of backlinks required. For instance, for PageRank 5, I found one page with just 88 backlinks and, at the other extreme, nearly 6,000,000.
2. There is an overlap between the ranges for the different PageRanks.
We must now address the question as to why there should be such a large range of backlink requirements for the different PageRanks and also why there is an overlap. The answer is that that not all backlinks are of equal value. Value of backlinks varies enormously. If the linking page has PageRank 0 then it will pass on no link juice and no contribution to PageRank.
Firstly, the value depends on the PageRank of the linking page. All things being equal, a link from a page of PageRank 6, will carry six times the value of a link from a page with PageRank 1. Links from pages with PageRank 0 carry no value.
The value of the link also depends on the number of links on the linking page. All things being equal, if one page has just two links and another page has 20 links then the value of the link from the one with just two links would be tenfold the value of the link on the page with 20 outbound links.
We also believe that the value of a backlink is modified by the relevance of the linking page and also by the anchor text.
Google provides us with just integer information on PageRank but we know that Google uses several decimal points. Thus, we could have a PageRank of 3 but Google knows that the PageRank 3.999 and virtually 4.
Finally, we must remember that the PageRank information available to us is always at least three months out of date.
PageRank is an overview of the four factors above. PageRank is superior to just backlink numbers and PageRank is the best available modality available to us for evaluating off-page optimisation. This study, together with the discussion of the results has recently been published - June 2010 on ezinearticles.com.