Editorial Articles

Emily Mace at Vertical Leap explores some of the key issues within SEO, and debunks a couple of myths

This is the first of a new series we will be working on discussing some of the myths in the SEO industry and helping you to understand what's real and what is just fluff and won't affect your ability to rank well in the search engines and get the all-important sales your business needs.

The first myth we're dealing with is PageRank (PR) and whether having a high page rank will show that your site will rank really well. This is a common myth and something which, even now comes up as something which might be important to the performance of a website. The myth here being that the higher the PR you have, the more rankings you have, the more visitors and sales you will get. Is this true or a myth?

Let's start at the beginning. What is PageRank? PR was developed when Google was first launched and is named after Larry Page, co-founder of Google. How PageRank is created is by working out how important a page on a website is by how many and what kinds of pages link through to it, along with some other data. This was the original factor used by Google for working out where a website should appear in the rankings.

There are two types of PageRank. The first is the PR which sits in the algorithm and which Google says is now one of over 200 ranking signals used in the algorithm to work out where a site or page should rank for any given keyword.

The second is the 'visible PR' which is what we can see in our browsers on the Google Toolbar or with a widget in Firefox or Chrome. This second type of PageRank is not the same as the one used to determine rankings.

The visible PR is also not updated as often as the PR used for the rankings and is actually just a snapshot, so when you see that your homepage has a visible PageRank of four this is actually what it had a few months before the last visible PR update and is not the complete picture of what the ranking version of your PR is.

The Visible PageRank used to be updated quite regularly but in recent years this has slowed right down so these figures are not updated very often anyway, and then when an update IS made, you are seeing a figure from a couple of months ago. Google actually admit that the visible PR is now only updated a couple of times a year. Last year Dave at Vertical Leap wrote a blog about how useless the visible PR of a website was, showing that some websites which were ranked really well in Google but had a PageRank of zero, so this visible PR actually meant nothing to rankings, and having ranking wasn't dependant on having a high PR.

PageRank is something Google are actively trying to move webmasters, marketers and SEO professionals away from. In 2009 they changed the Google Webmaster Tools interface to remove mention of PR, taking away the old PageRank distribution report as it wasn't a valid metric for your website. Last year on the Google Webmaster Blog they also published a post about not using PR as a metric for your website, in which they talk about the need to move away from PR as a measurement of your success as PR isn't the be all and end all.

What Google does value as a metric is relevancy. What Google cares about is more how the content of your website and the links you have are relevant to the keywords for which you want to rank. The more content you have on a topic the more likely you are to rank for a range of keywords on this subject.

So, why the attraction for people to focus on their website PR? The main reason for this is probably that it's a number and a mark out of 10 at that too. So from this point of view it's an attractive thing to report that "Our PageRank went up!" However, as the visible PR for your website and not the actual ranking factor, this isn't actually going to mean anything to your business, your visitors, sales or bottom line.

So what should you be monitoring and focussing your attention on instead of PageRank? Relevancy is the thing Google openly admit is important for rankings can't be monitored in the same way as it doesn't have this numeric representation so it's not as easy to report to your board of directors.

If you want to look at a metric which is useful for your website consider monitoring your website traffic instead. Some useful metrics for you to monitor could include:

• Visitors
• Organic visitors
• Non brand organic visitors
• Conversions and sales
• Organic conversions and sales
• Non brand organic conversions and sales

These can be compared year on year, so that you can see how your website and your SEO are performing in February 2012 compared to February 2011. This actually tells you how your website is doing and compares it to a similar time frame with the same seasonal trends.

At the end of the day if your PR has dropped but your visitors and sales have gone up, who cares about PageRank?

Visible PageRank is important for my site = myth!

Emily Mace, Vertical Leap