Pagerank Perplexities

Following the grand tradition of SEO, pagerank has gone from being something you needed to understand in order to improve site traffic, to something that is now downgraded to just another facet in the big picture, as spammers have manipulated it and made it less and less of an issue.

Pagerank IS still something that affects your Search Engine Positioning. Various writers have speculated that because pages with low pageranks are higher in the listing than pages with high pageranks, that pagerank no longer has any value in search engine positioning. They have misinterpreted what pagerank was all about, and what it is still about.

All pagerank ever meant is:

All else being equal between two pages in a search engine rank, the one with the higher pagerank will be positioned over the one with the lower pagerank.

That is all it ever was. It was never meant to mean that if a good page and a bad page were competing for the same space, that the bad page would be ranked higher because of a higher pagerank.

Content, and other weight factors are MORE important factors. And in theory, they always have been. Google has just made more of an effort to ensure that their algorithms were less manipulatable through nothing other than pagerank.

Pagerank is gained through backlinks. But not just any backlinks, those which Google considers to be “good” backlinks. Exactly how accurately Google can measure backlink quality is up for debate, and probably always will be. But backlinks from spam sites don’t count, and various factors influence how much value is given to those that do.

The rule is (and always has been), get good backlinks. Get them in legitimate ways (good quality directory links, link swaps with people you know, article marketing, forum posting, etc), and don’t try to manipulate the system.

Good backlinks help your site get more traffic, both directly, and indirectly. Pagerank is just a quick number that lets you know whether you’re doing enough to be noticed.