SEO in S. A.

I started writing this ages ago and just re-discovered it in my drafts folder and since Google appears to be in the process of getting rid of page rank, I figured I might as well complete it and post it. OK – so I doubt that Google is acually getting rid of page rank, they have already removed it from webmaster tools and many think that it may be removed from the toolbar as well soon, so they may well stop reporting at all in the future.

To tell the truth, I am sick to ‘kin’ death of answering questions about Page Rank! It is the most over used, abused and misunderstood concept in the science of search engine optimisation and in order to make my life a little easier, I’m going to do a series of posts about that magic green stripe in the Google tool bar and just direct people to my blog every time I get a question instead of repeating myself over and over again.

Right, so what is this page rank thing anyway?

I think everybody knows this, so I’m just going to do a very brief summary for any real noobs – skip ahead if you know this… In the old days, the early search engines only looked at on page factors when deciding which pages to display at the top of the rankings when people did a search for any particular keyword or phrase. Of course, as soon as people realised this, it became very easy to abuse the system and I can remember putting, er… shall we say keywords of a mature nature in my meta tags and using very primitive tricks like putting loads of keywords in white on a white background so that people couldn’t see them but the search engines would.

As a result my pages would show up when people did searches for things like “boobs” or “Britny Spears naked”  (and some others that are not as family friendly , even though the visible content of my page had nothing to do with those terms what so ever! I just knew what people were searching for, and it was easy enough to hijack them and present them with a page that was selling something or other. It was a dumb idea – this was before I learned about things like conversion rates so I got tons of traffic but hardly any sales!

But I wasn’t the only one doing this, and it was becoming increasingly difficult to find anything of value using the search engines of the day. Most people were doing it the other way around and so if you were searching for something as innocent, such as say “plumbing supplies”,  you would invariably get at least a couple of porn results in the mix.

 When Sergy Brin and Larry Page were at university, they came up with an idea that would make it much harder to cheat  and the search engines would be able to return much more relevant results. They created an algorithm that calculated the value of the number of  links to a site as well as the importance of the individual links and they used this as as an important factor in a “master” algorithm that determined which pages would rank higher for particular searches.

(Interesting side note – they didn’t set out to create a search engine company – they tried to sell the algorithm. Only after nobody wanted to buy it did they manage to raise a little venture capital and formed Google

Anyway – the sub algorithm, the one that calculates power of the incoming links to a page, was called Page Rank and it is displayed as a number between 0 and 10 in the Google tool bar if you have it installed. What is important here is that is just A factor (one of over 200) in the overall Google algorithm – not THE factor. It’s actual importance is mostly unknown but it is NOT as important as many people seem to believe!

It was a fairly complex mathematical alogorithm to start with (you can see the original here), but it has evolved over time to become far more complex and is kept top secret.

Now, most people think that page Rank is a number between 0 and 10 and nothing can be further from the truth. It is only displayedas a number between 0 and 10, but people forget that between any 2 whole numbers there are millions of smaller numbers! So even though 2 sites may appear have a Page Rank of 5, one may have a 5.00000001 and the other may have a 5.999 – mathematically speaking this is a HUGE difference!

To confuse matters – we believe that Page Rank is based on a base 8 logarithm – try to visualise it like this:

 OK – my numbers are totally hypothetical, but the premise holds true. If an inbound link from a page with PR 0 counts as one “point”, you will need at least 65 links from PR0 pages for your page to advance to a PR2 hich is fairly easy using basic beginner techniques such as link wheels, blog commenting, forum commenting etc, but to achieve a PR6 you would need to generate well over two million links!

Since links from pages with higher PR pass more PR to your pages, it may only take a couple of links from high PR pages for your page to achieve the same PR6 as more than two million low PR links would achieve. A PR6 can hypothetically be achieved by getting 2097152 links from PROs and PR1s (very difficult and time consuming) or from just 1o links from PR5s (also difficult, much much easier than the other way with some creative thinking).

But now I’ll say this again, Page Rank is just 1 of over 200 factors that Google use in their algorithm and most people are way to focused on it.

You shouln’t obsess over Page Rank, or even rankings!! The only metrics that count in the game are “how much traffic are you getting” and “how much of that traffic is converting into sales”.

Why knock yourself out and spend thousands of hours and dollars to get a high page rank? It means nothing and your time and money is much better spent getting customers than increadsing a metaphgysical number that may not mean anything at all.