Remember the days of the “Google Dance” when ranking algorithms were being updated and your rankings would shuffle around for a few days on different Google data centers? Web masters all over the world would wear out their “refresh” button as they obsessively check their top keywords to find out if they came out as winners or losers.

Back then Page Rank was often perceived as being the end-all value barometer for Google wealth. Entire industries emerged to “sell” high page rank sites and links. Some people would pay thousands of dollars per month for a single link on a page with high Page Rank in the hopes that some Google magic dust would rub off on their site too. With this came massive manipulation and fraud. Companies would set up sites in a matter of hours only to drive millions of links to artificially drive up the Page Rank. After they sell the domain or links for large sums of money, they would remove the links and the Page Rank would plummet. The manipulation of Page Rank which was the primary reason for building link popularity led to link farms, link exchanges, tri and quad level linking schemes, link baiting, and to some extent the emergence of social media through social tagging and bookmarking sites like Digg, Delicious, Reddit, Stumbleupon, Newsvine and countless others. Many of the major developments in Search Marketing over the years can find its roots in the Google Ranking algorithm and specifically Page Rank.

So what ever happened to Page Rank?

I’ll get to that in a moment but first we must start at the beginning. Page Rank was created by Google founders Larry Page (hence “Page” rank) and Sergey Brin while at Stanford University. They co-wrote their paper with Terry Winograd and Rajeev Motwani. The idea was to create a better search engine using linking as the foundation to determine relevance and value. If you think of a link as a “vote” in a link analysis algorithm, the more links (votes) a document has the more valuable it must be – at least that was the original theory.

We could talk forever about how Page Rank is calculated and transferred from one document to another, or how some links are worth more than others not because of Page Rank but because of the Trust and relevance of the linking document to the linked document.

We won’t get into a detailed mathematical discussion about influencing theories that the authors considered such as Eugene Garfield’s citation analysis, Jon Kleinberg’s HITS paper, and Massimo Marchiori’s Hyper Search but suffice to say that Page Rank was a very useful mathematical equation that helped propel search technology at a very early stage.

Almost since its inception Page Rank and link popularity has been manipulated and there has been a cat & mouse game between Google (and other search engines) and webmasters that have tried to game the system. In the end it comes down to money. In most cases traffic equals revenue whether it is selling display and contextual ads, affiliate services, leads, or products.

To this day there are countless people that are confused about Page Rank and its importance. You can go into forums such as DigitalPoint and see most of the members spreading misinformation. Then someone will come in and portray themselves as an expert, bashing everyone else only to spread more misinformation. It is quite sad to see actually because the average webmaster that is just trying to learn SEO to promote their business is being lead by other people that don’t know what they are talking about. Most of the advice is conjecture, rumor, or “hunches”.

Yes, I’ve been a professional SEO specialist for over a decade and work for a billion dollar media company with sites that generate nearly 100 million page views per month, but I’m telling you DO NOT TAKE MY WORD FOR IT. This isn’t some secret that only a select few people in the industry know about. The information is freely available from Google itself if you just take the time to search for it. But I digress…

Many people refer to the Google Toolbar rank which is displayed as a green bar with a value from 0-10. Not only does the number NOT represent the true Google PageRank value but the Toolbar PageRank is not updated for any new sites and many consider it obsolete. However, that doesn’t mean that an ACTUAL PageRank calculation doesn’t exist.

Page Rank as a concept of initial page value still exists within the Google Algorithm but even according to Google it has been tweaked and added to so much over the years that the value as a representation of site ranking is almost meaningless.

Having high PageRank does NOT mean your site will be indexed more often or deeper or that you will stay out of the supplementary index.

In 2008 Udi Manber, VP of engineering at Google, wrote on the Official Google Blog:

The most famous part of our ranking algorithm is PageRank, an algorithm developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, who founded Google. PageRank is still in use today, but it is now a part of a much larger system.

So what should you focus on if not PageRank?

After the Google Panda update and the subsequent updates since (many of which are attributed to Panda when in fact they were separate algorithm tweaks) it is clear that Google has MANY different factors they are weighing very heavily to determine Trust and relevance. I would even say that these factors have proven to be more important than PageRank.

I would suggest you focus first on the quality of content on your pages. It is almost funny to even have to suggest it. Even 10 years ago everyone was saying “Content is King”. Unfortunately no one ever wants to put in the time and effort to create pages of quality, useful information. Yes, I know all of the arguments that content considered “useful” to one person may not be to another. In fact there is a whole discussion we could have about “what is content?”  I agree with many of these very valid points. What right does Google have to determine value or content? But Google doesn’t care what you think and since we all play by their rules, the ONLY thing that truly matters is what Google considers useful and valuable. It sucks. I know. But it is the reality of the search environment we live in.

We all know it is easy to throw up hundreds, thousands, even millions of valueless pages but this practice will likely hurt you in the long run. Clean up those pages and focus on user experience. Do you really need 5 drill down pages in a directory that has little content or value if you can get someone to the information they are looking for quicker? If you have tons of directory or classified pages (for example) you may even consider disallowing them in the robots.txt file or moving those sections to a subdomain.  You can “noindex” them but the Google bot will still crawl them and you don’t want the bot bogged down crawling a ton of valueless pages that you don’t want indexed anyway. Just disallow those pages in the robots.txt and have the crawler focus on the quality pages.

Focus on page load time. Make your pages as light and fast as you can. This WILL help with indexing. If there is one thing we’ve learned by talking with some of the Google engineers it is that most of them are OBSESSED with efficiency.  I mean they are borderline fanatical about it. Page load is a big deal to them and well… it should be. It not only helps their ability to index the ever expanding Internet but it improves the user experience as well.

You should also seriously take a look at your Ad to Content ratio. I know this is a touchy subject for most companies including the very large sites I work on. It is hard to eliminate revenue from your site but we know that too many ads (especially above the fold) is an easy trigger for Google to look at to determine the quality of user experience. The idea would be that by removing some ads or working those placements into the content in a more non-obtrusive way, you will increase user engagement and the pages per visit. Believe me, I know there are TONS of ways to “trick” the users into filling out lead forms or click on Ads but this isn’t the wild west of SEO anymore where anything goes. It is time to clean up your act and build a service with longevity or your rankings WILL suffer.

Specific KPIs you can look at would be bounce rate and PPV.

Do not worry about PR sculpting too much. Again, PageRank by itself is nearly meaningless at this point. The chances are that the practices you may use to deceptively increase your PageRank will hurt you in countless other ranking signals that they look at.

We’ll go over additional ranking techniques in other articles. Let us know if you have any other questions. We are always here to help!