Google Pagerank

Imagine my surprise when Darren Rowse of Problogger reported that his web site went from PR6 to PR4. And it wasn’t only him, many other prominent blogs have also experienced PageRank drops.

There have been many theories and speculations on why such a thing happened. Here are some of the mor prominent ones I’ve read:

1. Selling Links

It’s such an irony, really, that this would happen soon after I blogged about selling links. Blog networks who usually sell links as part of their revenue making plan were given a lot of think about — do they play by Google’s rules and give up a big part of their revenue or do they do what they usually do?

2. Google Algorithm Change

You didn’t think the Google algorithm would remain the same forever, did you? It might have changed, they might have tweaked it, the possibilities are endless.

3. WidgetBucks

I’m supposed to blog about Widgetbucks this week in the online marketing blog and this happens. Thing is, WidgetBucks has a hidden text link ad behind the Flash animation. The hidden link is reportedly:

<a href=”http://www.widgetbucks.com” target=”_blank”>WidgetBucks - Trend Watch - WidgetBucks.com</a>

However, WidgetBucks had an update just after the “Google PageTank” and removed their hidden text link which is against Google’s guidelines. Many speculated this was done to regain the big G’s favor since WidgetBucks doesn’t even rank for their own name. But in the PinoyMoneyTalk blog, Greg Harrison of WidgetBucks made an appearance and commented that it wasn’t the case at all and the new WidgetBucks update is to accommodate the changes brought about by the Akamai content delivery network.

As of now, some web sites have rebounded back to their normal PR rankings. Still, one has to wonder if such a thing will happen again in the future. Lesson learned from this whole ordeal? PageRank isn’t everything. Your PR dropped? Get on with life — the world goes on, so should you.

I noticed that google rolled out an update for their pageranks today. The pagerank you see from google toolbar, or pagerank status (firefox extension) are only updated around every two months.

Google does this to keep people guessing. If you could see your pagerank change every day or two, you would be able to figure SEO’s would be able to figure out what works better easier.

As we have pointed out before on this blog, PageRank is a tool used by Google to determine which sites to show to their search engine users. Sites that appear to be most popular, most relevant, and most useful are placed at the top of their results. Those that do not meet these qualities, or are new, are placed at the bottom or out of the results altogether. Obviously, it would behoove a new website or blog owner to ensure his or her PageRank is as high as possible.

Before we go into how to actually raise PageRank, let’s first discuss just why this particular tool is useful. As described above, a higher PageRank means that more people searching for your topic will see your site. Simple logic indicates that this will result in higher traffic. And of course higher traffic usually means that your ads and other money-making mechanisms will be more successful.

But this isn’t the only benefit that a high PageRank has. Sites that have high PageRanks are very appealing to new site owners and blog creators who are looking for text links. The best way to build up traffic and PageRank, after all, is to be linked to by a site with a high ranking itself. Thus having a PageRank of 7 or so means that you can sell text links for high amounts of cash and generate income that way.

No matter how you look at it, a high PageRank is almost necessary for a site to make money. It opens up multiple possibilities in ways to generate cash and allows you to spend more time focusing on your content instead of getting links.

The common misconception about Page Rank (PR) is that it is calculated by a number of different factors. The simple fact is that that notion is completely false. Your PR is affected by one thing and one thing only, Links!!! The more links you have pointing to your site, the higher the pagerank. Now, don’t think that you can just go get any link from any site and achieve PR greatness, you have to earn it with quality. PR is only passed on to your site from other sites that have PR. You will not gain PR from a link on a page that has a PR0. This will do nothing for you, maybe you will get some traffic from it, but that is another story all together. The objective of the PR game is to gather relative links from sites that have a good PR, like 3 and above. It can be very easy to achieve a PR1 or 2, but it gets harder as it goes upwards. In order to focus on PR increases, you need to focus on acquiring links to point to your site. You can do this a number of ways, either by mutual link exchange, directory submissions, or link purchases. A great place to purchase links is from the Digitalpoint forum links sales section. I have found that there are some good links for a great price on that forum. So, to put the misconception to rest, PR

The new Page Rank update is keeping some webmasters up late at night wondering what is going on.  Though some have said it already has passed, other say it hasn’t happened yet.  I believe that it hasn’t happened yet.  Yes there are some sites that have been updated, but not the vast majority of them.  Come to find out, this update is getting close to the record for the amount of time between updates.  I think the record is 122 days and we are at 112.  I know a lot of us hope it is going to happen soon because everyone has put a lot of time and I’m sure money into getting the necessary backlinks in order to increase that PR.

Now some of you may ask, why do so many of you webmasters care so much about PR.  Well, if you have ever sold advertising space on a site, then you would understand.  PR and price coincide with each other.  Without the PR, people will not be as eager to advertise on your site than others that have plenty of PR.  Now do not get me wrong, you can still sell ad space if you have the traffic, but not everyone does.  PR helps out a lot.  Let’s just hope this PR update comes by the end of the month.

Google PageRank (PR) is a measure from 0 -10 of how important Google thinks a webpage is. In Google’s eyes a webpage with a PageRank of 10/10 is very important and a webpage with a PageRank of 0/10 is not very important. If you have the Google toolbar installed on your browser then it will automatically tell you the PageRank of any webpage you are looking at, if you do not have one then you can check Google PageRank (PR) by visiting the following website.

PageRank Checking Tool

Generally websites with higher PageRank will get better rankings in Google’s search results. Google takes into consideration many things when it is calculating PageRank, one of the most important factors is the amount of quality incoming links a webpage has. Generally the more quality links a webpage has the higher the Google PageRank (PR) will be, therefore you can increase PageRank by gaining more quality links.

Google PageRank (PR) updates about once every three months. People have come up with ways of trying to predict what your Pagerank is likely to be at the next update. Although no one can tell for sure the guys at Iwebtool have come up with a pretty good prediction tool.

Iwebtool PageRank Predictor

This tool does not always get it right, it does give you a very good idea of what your future PageRank is likely to be though, if you work hard at link building you will see your predicted PageRank increase and when the next update comes you should see your PageRank increase.

“How many Backlinks do I need to get in order to have PR5?”. The answer is simple and always the same one: “This question cannot be answered because the PR doesn’t only depend on the number of backlinks, it also and above all depends on the PR of each of those links…”. Or to put it differently, a page can have PR5 with a single backlink whereas another one can have 3,000 backlinks and PR5 too.As a result it seems useless to carry out this type of analysis… Except if one is to compare the results in the long term. That’s what I have been doing over the past eight months by analysing tens of thousands of pages. For each data I get the number of backlinks and the PR of the page with those links. The data do not come from a tool using a Google Toolbar crack but from the “MyWri” tools on WebRankInfo which enables each WebRrankInfo member to instantly get the PR and the number of backlinks of 10 chosen sites (many other free SEO tools are also freely provided).

Results

The results are presented in the following table. For example the cell corresponding to column 5/2004 and row PR5 shows that in May 2004, an average of 104 backlinks was required to get a PR5. The number of sites analysed to get this figure appears on hovering over with the mouse (1044 measures in the given example).

As a conclusion

Some conclusions to be drawn:

• With a few exceptions, whatever the PR is, more backlinks than the month before are required every month to get a given PR.
• As expected, one needs far more backlinks in order to get a high PR than a low one. Even if there may be exceptions, because the study deals with a good number of data, it gives experimental support to the theoretical hypotheses or ideas never proved before but only discussed in forums.
• During this summer (2004), Google changed the behaviour of the link: command which now includes low PR pages. Only PR4 or higher PR pages used to be listed by this command. Conversely since this summer you can also list the low PR pages backlinks, which you can see in the table.

I am busy preparing further studies on the subject and I hope to be able to share the results with you pretty soon. Please do get in touch if you wish to make suggestions.

Other studies

For those of you not yet aware, Google is currently updating the PageRank they are displaying in their toolbar. Each update causes a stir among the SEO community and webmasters trying to get their websites to the top of the Google Rankings.

What Is PageRank? Without getting into too much detail, PageRank is essentially a score out of ten as to the “value” of your site in comparison to other websites on the Internet. It is based on two primary factors; the number of links you have pointing to your website and the value of the links pointing to your website. The value is calculated based on the PageRank of the page linking to you and debatably the relevancy of the page linking to you (there is no hard evidence to back up the relevancy factor in regards to PageRank that I have seen however it definitely is a factor in your overall ranking).

If you are interested in more information on PageRank you would do well to visit the many forums and articles on the topic and also visit Google’s own description on their website at http://www.google.com/technology/ where they give a brief description of the technology.

What’s New?

The most current PageRank update will undoubtedly cause a larger stir than usual in that many sites have shown drops in their visible PageRank while at the same time showing significant increases in their backlinks. This fact reveals that one of three things has occurred in this latest update:

1. Google has raised the bar on PageRank, making it more difficult to attain a high level, or

2. The way they are displaying their backlinks has changed, or

3. The way they calculate the value of an incoming link has changed.

Any of these are possible and has been noted in the past as something they are willing to do. Additionally, it is possible for all to occur at the same time.

As we don’t like to use client’s as examples I will use the Beanstalk site, backlink counts, and PageRank changes as the meter by which the following conclusions are drawn, however this information was attained through looking at a number of client website, and their competitors.

Google Raising The Bar To Lower Yours

In the past few PageRank updates it has become quite apparent that Google is continuously raising the bar on PageRank. In their defense, with all of the reciprocal link building, link renting, etc. going on this was a natural reaction to the growing number high PageRank sites that attained those ranks simply by building or buying hundreds and thousands of links.

There is no doubt that this is a factor in the changes in this current update. If your site has maintained it’s PageRank, and the PageRanks of your second-level pages then you have done well in holding steady and if your competitors have not been as diligent their positions will slip.

New Backlink Calculations

I mention this one only to bring to light that it is a possibility for your future consideration during other updates. The Beanstalk website went from 750 shown backlinks on Google to 864. it should be noted that Google does not show all backlinks (if you want a more accurate backlink count go to Yahoo! and enter “link:http://www.yourdomain.com” (don’t forget the http://)).

When the Beanstalk site showed 750 backlinks on Google we were showing around 12,000 on Yahoo! (about 6.5% showing on Google). The Beanstalk site is now showing 864 on Google and 15,500 on Yahoo! (about 5.6%). If anything then, Google is showing less links than before which negates the possibility that a website’s PageRank is dropping due to a decrease in links but being hidden by an increased number being displayed.

In short, while which backlinks Google chooses to display has certainly changed over time it does not appear to be a major factor in this update. If you see an increase in your sites backlink counts during this update you undoubtedly have an increased number of links.

The Value Of Links

Separate from the number of links you have is their value. This appears to be an area of significant change in this update. Areas that appear to have reduced value in regards to affecting PageRank are:

1. Multiple links from the same site or run-of-site links

Intelligent and relevant reciprocal links do not seem to have been penalized, probably due to the increased relevancy factor. If you reduce the value of irrelevant links and raise the value of relevant ones then there is no need to penalize reciprocal links as, done incorrectly, they will penalize themselves.

2. Links with text around them that indicate they are purchased such as “Partners”, “Advertising”, etc.

Google has and is actively trying to reduce the value of paid links. This appears to have been moderately successful where there is clear indication that the link is paid for.

3. Links from sites that hold little relevancy (this factor is based on educated speculation)

The relevancy factor appears to have become more important. Links from sites with content related to yours is showing positive results while sites with larger numbers of less relevant links are showing drops in PageRank.

What Does This Mean?

For those of you who have been proactive in your link building, and focused on relevant sites using the Google Directory, searches or a tool like PR Prowler it means, “stay the course”. Those of you who have been building or buying links based only on PageRank with little concern for it’s location, or how it is presented - you will need to adjust your link building efforts accordingly.

What Do I Do - My PageRank Dropped ?!!?

The first thing not to do is panic. Take a deep breath, PageRank is one factor of dozens that Google uses to determine the ranking of your page, it is not the only thing. Now, visit your main competitors sites - there’s a good chance you’ll see that they too dropped in PageRank. The plus side to these kinds of updates is that they’re universal. It’s not as if Google has it in for you specifically and so when they do an update, the positive and negative impact is felt by all.

Now, if you’ve noticed that everyone around you has stayed the same or increased in PageRank try to remember this, there’s nothing you can do about where you’re currently positioned in regards to PageRank and it will probably be another 3 months before Google updates the public PageRank again so … start building some good quality (high relevancy, solid PageRank) links, work towards and increase in the next update.

Panicking now won’t help, intelligent reaction will.

What Happens Now?

Traditionally the search engine results will begin to fluctuate based on the new visible PageRank 3 to 7 days after they are visible. This does not have to be the case as Google’s had these numbers all along but it’s worked this way in the majority of cases in recent history. So monitor your search engine positions over the next week or two and watch for changes. Try to hold back on making major changes to your site during this time as often the final positions will differ from those that can be viewed during the shuffling. In a couple weeks time evaluate where you stand and tweak your site as necessary but don’t spend too much time on that … you have a solid link building effort to undertake.

PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Google calculates a page’s importance from the votes cast for it. How important each vote is is taken into account when a page’s PageRank is calculated.
PageRank is Google’s way of deciding a page’s importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determine a page’s ranking in the search results. It isn’t the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.

Description of PageRank Calculation

Academic citation literature has been applied to the web, largely by counting citations or backlinks to a given page. This gives some approximation of a page’s importance or quality. PageRank extends this idea by not counting links from all pages equally, and by normalizing by the number of links on a page. PageRank is defined as follows: We assume page A has pages T1…Tn which point to it (i.e., are citations). The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. We usually set d to 0.85. There are more details about d in the next section. Also C(A) is defined as the number of links going out of page A. The PageRank of a page A is given as follows: PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + … + PR(Tn)/C(Tn)) Note that the PageRanks form a probability distribution over web pages, so the sum of all web pages’ PageRanks will be one.

PageRank or PR(A) can be calculated using a simple iterative algorithm, and corresponds to the principal eigenvector of the normalized link matrix of the web. Also, a PageRank for 26 million web pages can be computed in a few hours on a medium size workstation. There are many other details which are beyond the scope of this paper.

To calculate the PageRank for a page, all of its inbound links are taken into account. These are links from within the site and links from outside the site. PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn)) That’s the equation that calculates a page’s PageRank. It’s the original one that was published when PageRank was being developed, and it is probable that Google uses a variation of it but they aren’t telling us what it is. It doesn’t matter though, as this equation is good enough. In the equation ‘t1 - tn’ are pages linking to page A, ‘C’ is the number of outbound links that a page has and ‘d’ is a damping factor, usually set to 0.85. We can think of it in a simpler way:- a page’s PageRank = 0.15 + 0.85 * (a “share” of the PageRank of every page that links to it) “share” = the linking page’s PageRank divided by the number of outbound links on the page. A page “votes” an amount of PageRank onto each page that it links to. The amount of PageRank that it has to vote with is a little less than its own PageRank value (its own value * 0.85). This value is shared equally between all the pages that it links to. From this, we could conclude that a link from a page with PR4 and 5 outbound links is worth more than a link from a page with PR8 and 100 outbound links. The PageRank of a page that links to yours is important but the number of links on that page is also important. The more links there are on a page, the less PageRank value your page will receive from it. If the PageRank value differences between PR1, PR2,…..PR10 were equal then that conclusion would hold up, but many people believe that the values between PR1 and PR10 (the maximum) are set on a logarithmic scale, and there is very good reason for believing it. Nobody outside Google knows for sure one way or the other, but the chances are high that the scale is logarithmic, or similar. If so, it means that it takes a lot more additional PageRank for a page to move up to the next PageRank level that it did to move up from the previous PageRank level. The result is that it reverses the previous conclusion, so that a link from a PR8 page that has lots of outbound links is worth more than a link from a PR4 page that has only a few outbound links. Whichever scale Google uses, we can be sure of one thing. A link from another site increases our site’s PageRank. Just remember to avoid links from link farms. Note that when a page votes its PageRank value to other pages, its own PageRank is not reduced by the value that it is voting. The page doing the voting doesn’t give away its PageRank and end up with nothing. It isn’t a transfer of PageRank. It is simply a vote according to the page’s PageRank value. It’s like a shareholders meeting where each shareholder votes according to the number of shares held, but the shares themselves aren’t given away. Even so, pages do lose some PageRank indirectly, as we’ll see later. For a page’s calculation, its existing PageRank (if it has any) is abandoned completely and a fresh calculation is done where the page relies solely on the PageRank “voted” for it by its current inbound links, which may have changed since the last time the page’s PageRank was calculated. The equation shows clearly how a page’s PageRank is arrived at. But what isn’t immediately obvious is that it can’t work if the calculation is done just once. Suppose we have 2 pages, A and B, which link to each other, and neither have any other links of any kind. This is what happens:- Step 1: Calculate page A’s PageRank from the value of its inbound links Page A now has a new PageRank value. The calculation used the value of the inbound link from page B. But page B has an inbound link (from page A) and its new PageRank value hasn’t been worked out yet, so page A’s new PageRank value is based on inaccurate data and can’t be accurate. Step 2: Calculate page B’s PageRank from the value of its inbound links Page B now has a new PageRank value, but it can’t be accurate because the calculation used the new PageRank value of the inbound link from page A, which is inaccurate. It’s a Catch 22 situation. We can’t work out A’s PageRank until we know B’s PageRank, and we can’t work out B’s PageRank until we know A’s PageRank. Now that both pages have newly calculated PageRank values, can’t we just run the calculations again to arrive at accurate values? No. We can run the calculations again using the new values and the results will be more accurate, but we will always be using inaccurate values for the calculations, so the results will always be inaccurate. The problem is overcome by repeating the calculations many times. Each time produces slightly more accurate values. In fact, total accuracy can never be achieved because the calculations are always based on inaccurate values. 40 to 50 iterations are sufficient to reach a point where any further iteration wouldn’t produce enough of a change to the values to matter. This is precisiely what Google does at each update, and it’s the reason why the updates take so long. One thing to bear in mind is that the results we get from the calculations are proportions. The figures must then be set against a scale (known only to Google) to arrive at each page’s actual PageRank. Even so, we can use the calculations to channel the PageRank within a site around its pages so that certain pages receive a higher proportion of it than others.
You may come across explanations of PageRank where the same equation is stated but the result of each iteration of the calculation is added to the page’s existing PageRank. The new value (result + existing PageRank) is then used when sharing PageRank with other pages. These explanations are wrong for the following reasons:- 1. They quote the same, published equation - but then change it from PR(A) = (1-d) + d(……) to PR(A) = PR(A) + (1-d) + d(……) It isn’t correct, and it isn’t necessary. 2. We will be looking at how to organize links so that certain pages end up with a larger proportion of the PageRank than others. Adding to the page’s existing PageRank through the iterations produces different proportions than when the equation is used as published. Since the addition is not a part of the published equation, the results are wrong and the proportioning isn’t accurate. According to the published equation, the page being calculated starts from scratch at each iteration. It relies solely on its inbound links. The ‘add to the existing PageRank’ idea doesn’t do that, so its results are necessarily wrong.

Inbound links

Inbound links send visitors to your web site. Generally, this is seen as a good thing. Many sites go to great lengths to achieve as much of this “free” advertising as possible, although a few sites are very particular about where the links are pointing

Inbound links are one way to increase a site’s total PageRank.Google recognizes that a webmaster has no control over other sites linking into a site, and so sites are not penalized because of where the links come from. There is an exception to this rule but it is rare and doesn’t concern this article. It isn’t something that a webmaster can accidentally do.

Outbound link

Outbound links send visitors away from your web site. Attitudes towards outbound links vary considerably among site owners. Some site owners still link freely. Some refuse to link at all, and some provide links that open in a new browser window.Opponents of outbound linking argue that it risks losing time and money from site visitors. This can be a large risk if a site is facing high customer acquisition costs.Proponents argue that providing high quality references actually enhances the value of a site and increases the chance of return visitors.Outbound links are a drain on a site’s total PageRank. They leak PageRank. To counter the drain, try to ensure that the links are reciprocated. Because of the PageRank of the pages at each end of an external link, and the number of links out from those pages, reciprocal links can gain or lose PageRank. You need to take care when choosing where to exchange links. When PageRank leaks from a site via a link to another site, all the pages in the internal link structure are affected. (This doesn’t always show after just 1 iteration). The page that you link out from makes a difference to which pages suffer the most loss. Without a program to perform the calculations on specific link structures, it is difficult to decide on the right page to link out from, but the generalization is to link from the one with the lowest PageRank.

When to Link Out of Your SiteYou should link to another web site when:

• You are ignorant about a topic
• You need the backing of an authority
• Your site does not focus on the topic at hand
• You have a reciprocal agreement with a strategic partner
• You want or need to diversify your content
• Your page or your site needs complimentary content
• You can help your user make an important decision

Domain names and Filenames To a spider, http://www.doyell.com/, yahoo.com/, http://www.doyell.com/index.php and google.com/index.php are different urls and, therefore, different pages. Surfers arrive at the site’s home page whichever of the urls are used, but spiders see them as individual urls, and it makes a difference when working out the PageRank. It is better to standardize the url you use for the site’s home page. Otherwise each url can end up with a different PageRank, whereas all of it should have gone to just

http://www.vivopress.com/

http://www.rightmoveindia.com

Yea its going on right now, and im part cheerful about it, way too many things going on in my life atm.
The PR Update went down at August 5th 2007 on my watch. 

Is Google planning their long awaiting PageRank update for August 2007? Obviously many of us tied in with the 30 Day Challenge - understand and monitor PageRank; Google hasn’t updated their PageRank for around 90 days now and many keen bloggers and webmasters are expecting the latest Google Page Rank update for August 2007 to happen within the next 12 days.

The mass update in PageRank for August, has many webmasters crossing fingers and others hoping to get listed in Google for the very first time.

Many of you built new sites in the beginning of 2007 and still have no Google page rank after all the hard work you put into building quality back links, optimizing and adding new pages, and every other tedious detail involved with properly optimizing your site for the engines.

Well the word is that the wait is almost over. Google will be updating all its servers and handing out grades in the very near future. All the speculation about what will work and wont work for the best results in your website’s placement are about to show themselves.

Once the Google page rank update starts, it will take a couple of weeks to complete so you will probably see some fluctuation in your Page Rank on different pages of your site for a while but things will settle down and your new Page Pank will be good until the next update.

Will your Google Page Rank go up or down on the next massive Google update ? Only time will tell. If you have done all the work required to rank well, then you will mostly be rewarded with a pretty reasonable Google Page Rank and the other search engine will follow right behind the master.

Hows your Google PageRank look? Even a regularly updated PR2 or more these days will ensure Google visit your site and spider it almost daily - and your content has a chance of rating high in the Google Servers. Love to hear from everyone on their PageRank stories and theories - so feel free to post!