Google PageRank, Links and Content

No one knows how Google decides to rank pages, regardless of what bogus SEO specialists and email spam will try and get you to believe; no one knows why Google ranks some pages higher and some pages lower; no one knows what it even means to have a PageRank of 6 out of 10, or 3 out of 10, or 8 out of 10. Google states in its toolbar, that ‘PageRank is Google’s measure of the importance of this page’ – but what does that mean, if anything at all?

1. It doesn’t mean you’ll get more visitors if your page is ranked 6 rather than 5 or 4.
2. It doesn’t mean anything at all to searches in Yahoo, MSN and the many other major search engines.
3. It doesn’t mean that a site with a higher ‘Google PageRank’ than yours is a better site than yours.

It seems that everyone on the internet who swaps links is totally obsessed with what Google thinks and Google PageRanks, ‘Hi, I’m the webmaster of blabla.net; I will place your link on a page rank 4 page if you place mine on the same…’ et cetera et cetera ad nauseum.

The truth is that the more webmasters try and influence their placing in Google search results, the more Google are going to make it difficult to achieve. Now that Google has put a six month waiting list, effectively, on page ranking for new web sites, is it really worth bothering with? Should we really give a damn what Google thinks?

No, no we should not give a damn what PageRank Google wishes to give our sites, it’s meaningless, it’s puerile and pointless. Google has become the top search engine by producing the most relevant search results, page ranks have nothing to do with it.

Try searching for a simple term like, ‘dream interpretation’ for instance and you’ll find a mixture of PR 5, PR 4 and even a couple of PR 3 sites listed on the first page – so we have to assume that Google PageRank is like a merit badge at best, has no relevance to search results; and, at worst, is a clever trick to leave ‘specialists’ pulling their hair out – wondering why their page rank 6 site is listed below that crumby page rank 3 site.

The most likely reason that the PR 3 site lists higher than the PR 6 site is that it has the more relevant information on it.

So, bearing all this in mind, where does that leave the honest web site owner who just wants to get noticed? Well, that’s the good part, it leaves you with a better internet, an internet the way it was meant to be when it all started. A superhighway of information at your fingertips where all the responsible webmaster need do is keep writing good quality, original content for her/his site and the results will materialize.

If only half the sites on the internet decided to pack in all their Google manipulation efforts and donated all the energy saved into building a great site, the internet would be a much nicer, more efficient and more profitable place.

Swap links with relevant and interesting sites, pretend Google does not exist and keep adding that wonderful, original content. The more info relevant to your genre you can get on there the better.

Only swap links with sites that have a clearly labelled links page, where your link will easily be found – any other kind of link is useless. This works both ways, any webmaster who hides their links page, puts a tiny link to it at the bottom of the front page or even in a separate site map to avoid visitors leaving is just deluding themselves – people will come and go from your site all the time, they aren’t going to stay because they can’t find any links, they are only going to stay if what they find is interesting.

They will remember which sites had the interesting links on, that were easy to find, and return.

SWAP LINKS FOR VISITORS NOT FOR PAGE RANK should be every webmaster’s linking motto.

CONTENT CONTENT CONTENT should be their mantra!