Ignore PageRank but network like hell!

More and more commentators are writing about ignoring Google PageRank, that it’s no longer that important when it comes to getting a good ranking. People have noticed that some web pages apperaing near the top of some search engine results pages (SERPs) have a lower page rank than those further down the page - henece page rank is not that important.

I’d say that if you ignore PageRank or more accurately, ignore the theory behind PageRank when you are promoting your website online, you can expect to get good rankings through accidental marketing only.

Unless you are the type of business or individual that updates their website on a regular basis, once a week or thereabouts, ignoring the theory of how PageRank works will negatively impact your online traffic.

Lets go back to a fundatmental question - How does a search engine determine the order in which web pages are returned on a SERP?

Search engines use two core scores for determining relevancy, Content score and Popularity score.

When someone types in a search query to a search engine, the ‘Query Module’ part of the search engine receives a long list of web pages from the various indexes [Content is scored]. Returning this long list to the user is fairly pointless as there would be no rating of ‘relevancy’.

The relevancy part happens when the Query module passes the long list of web pages to a ‘Ranking Module’. This module scores each of the web pages according to some criteria and then passes the resulting ordered list to the user [Content scored plus Populatiry scored].

The criteria that the ranking module uses are all based on the linking landscape of each web page, e.g.

• number of web pages pointing at a web page
• authority of links to web pages
• keywords in link, i.e. link text
• keywords around link

So, back to PageRank, what is it? Well its a measure of a web pages popularity. Measuring this parameter is still core to the functionality of a search engine. If you ignore the Popularity score you are ignoring arguably the most important part of the search engine.

Have you ever typed in a search query and a web page was returned, near the top, that seemed to have little relevance to the keywords typed in. This is because the web page in question probably has a very high Popularity score.

So, yes ignore Page Rank, but make sure you’re working at getting links to your web pages. Relying soley on your content to give you good ranking is not a good web site marketing strategy.

Naturally there is the argument that good content attracts good links, maybe, but you still have to initially work at promoting your content.