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PageRank has been the topic of many a spirited debate amongst the SEO community-at-large for a long time now. Some professionals will tell you that PR is completely inconsequential to search rankings, while others will swear upon the lives of their children that PR is the driving force behind the success of their sites. Andy Steggles of SitePR Tracker talks with Mike McDonald of WebProNews at Search Engine Strategies in Chicago about the true value of PageRank, and what it should and shouldn’t mean for your site.
Andy talks about his past experiences with the PageRank feature and the discrepancies that have occurred in Google Webmaster Tools in regards to finding the highest PR value page on his site. Bearing this in mind, he stresses that PageRank in and of itself is not a tool for boosting search engine rankings. It is, however, a good barometer to gauge how Google perceives the “quality” of your pages, an issue that is becoming increasingly important as Google tweaks its algorithm for calculating quality score, and consequently adjusting minimum bid values based on the findings.
One of the major PageRank killers is duplicate content. If your site’s content is mirrored in a good number of other online sources, your PR will drop faster than Kevin Federline’s net worth. Therefore, it is vital that webmasters pay as much attention to the originality of their content as possible. If you have other users that submit content to your site, encourage them to put their own spin on things instead of simply scraping text from one site and pasting it on yours.
Above all, however, don’t invest the majority of your time obsessing over PageRank as the end-all, be-all of tools for achieving high search rankings. PR is only an indicator of quality, and therefore is just one cog in the wheel that drives the machine of search engine optimization.
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This should not be so surprising. ,
I agree with Brett T. Smith regarding the GBar. It’s all about the relevancy and and where the site is placed in the Google Search.
I was wondering what the value is for say pagerank 1 or 9
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[...] video coverage from SES Chicago 2006: SES: A Deeper Look Into AskCity Dissecting the Value of PageRank The Generative Nature of Online Video Marketing Search Engine Strategies, Chicago 2006 [...]
PR is a marketing tool only. It means nothing as a measure of popularity, or amount a traffic a site gets. I have banned sites, no PR at all, not indexed in G, that get more traffic then some of my PR6 sites. So what’s all the fuss over PR? Clearly it is a indicator by webmasters, and it does have value in that it shows you how will you “could” do in G serps. I’m not against PR at all, just wished other engines had their own, and people kept PR in it’s proper light. As for duplicate content, I believe G is too strict. Their supplementary results is proof of that where you will also find dupes, but more important then that, blogs and forums are hit the hardest with dupes. All blogs have to do is use several catgories for a post, and bingo, G see’s duplicate content! I have nothing against G, but IMHO, they are just way over strict with dupes.
I don’t think the visual PageRank value we see in the GBar is really that useful anymore. I don’t think that PageRank is really important in terms of rankings anymore either. What matters is relevancy and trust gathered from on and off-page factors. I do remember the days when having a higer PageRank actually did boost rankings but that is just not the case anymore. I do feel that there is some kind of topical PageRank that it is keeping track of based on incoming and outbound links and I do think this makes a difference in rankings but I think this is an invisible factor that only Google knows.
I have been involved recently with some sites where the clients’ site has not had more than the first page and one other page in the Google index. The SEO company had targetted only the home page and all the other pages had the same title, keyphrases and description tags. the home page had a PR5 and the rest of the site a PR0. I think it is important to have the PR evenly distributed and I totally agree with the supplemental listings with duplicating the description tag. All pages need to be individual and content relevant.
We have just launched a new site and we are using various techniques. the phrase we are going for is search engine consultants. We are experimenting with different linking on different pages and it will be interesting to see the PR and the results.
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Chiff:
I would disagree with you there. What if the original article is just a page with the article, and the site navigation. The author posts it to an article site and it gets picked up. A savvy webmaster takes that same article, and to ‘enhance’ it, displays and wealth of related resources that are most helpful to the user, around the article, making the duplicate more valubale than the original – from a user standpoint.
It would then make sense for the search engines to display the ‘enhanced’ article in the SERPS. No?
My site May’s House of Beauty has a PR of 3 on the homepage, but PR 0 for the rest of the pages. Is that normal?
Thanks for the feedback everyone, it’s always good to hear opinions. One thing which I failed to mention on the video is what the sitePRTracker.com tool does. It’s a free tool which allows you to retrieve the actual value of every page in your site – can be pretty handy. As for Feodor’s comment about the value jumping up and down, the tool shows the IP address of the data-center it has queried, so you know whether you are just looking at inconsistant data or if there has actually been a move. The free version allows you to retrieve up to 200 pages. Have a play, it’s pretty cool.
Cheers all,
Andy
Go to http://www.sitePRTracker.com
To understand the issue of duplicate content from Google’s perspective, I believe you have to switch your webmaster’s hat for a Web surfer’s.
Google’s job is to deliver the best results for each search term quried. An article gets posted that seems extremely relevant to your search and Google leads you there. If that same article – or others that are very similar – get posted later to other sites, there is no need for Google to give you those duplications in your search results. The original article gets the PR and the SERP placement – duplicate copies are not needed to provide the answers to a searcher.
Putting your webmaster’s hat back on…what this means is if you put content up on more than one site – or on more than one page of your site — only the original page will be recognized as holding unique content.
However, if you allow another site to publish your article you still gain free publicity and a link back to your site for visitors – and the search engines – to follow. You also increase the resources that you serve to your visitors – even if one of those resources does not rank well in Google’s eyes, the more resources you offer, the better your site is overall…and that counts for a lot with your visitors and with the search engines.
I don’t think Google ignores any web pages for indexing and linking purposes, it just doesn’t make sense for Google to serve three SERPs listing the same article.
Always remember that Google needs to provide the best search results to stay alive – publisher’s needs are very secondary to that. Do you want to see site after site with the exact same info served to you when you search? If your answer is no – you should understand the problem with duplicate content.
[...] The video can be seen here. Its definitely a good watch for someone who is interested in improving the page rank and search positions in one’s websites. Bookmark to: Filed under SEO by Bruce Hopkins Permalink • Print • Email • Comment [...]
The subject is really good. Althoug there is nothing really new at this topic. (sorry about the bad English)
It is all a big mystery with Google. My pagerank jumps between 3 and 4 every second day. I can’t figure out why.
And also the backward links function in the Google bar says that I have one backward link and that is not true, and sometimes it says that I don’t have any at all.
This will always be a hot topic. PR should not be the indicator from which we measure success on any site. It is after all, a “indicator”. As was mentioned duplicate content plays a huge role, not only in PR status, but more so in rankings. One thing Jaan mentioned in his comment above is that duplicate Meta description tags also affects your rankings. The description tag is a lot easier to change/update on than content on the site itself. Somehow I am glad that my site does not have 150 000 pages…
Also there are sites that run RSS content borrowed from other sites these will appear commonly accros all sites does this mean that some rss content will devalue the page rank of the entire site?
sounds ggod
I am thinking that there must be a filter built in the the duplicate content issue with regard to pagerank. Im sure Google doesnt want to penalise sites that write the original content. With that being said, if the original creator posts the same content on article niche sites to hopefully direct niche traffic to his/her site, why should they be punished under duplicate content? Therefore I guess that there should be some sort of filter by number of duplicates in the index. Lets say up each duplicate devalues the PR but in a logarithmic scale. 500 Duplicate pages would get penalised a lot. Fair comment.
Another issue is what if people copy and paste in breach of copywrite your originak content? Again why should yoy get penalised. I guess again that Google probably has the ability to track the age of the content too.
But Im guessing, as we all are to some extent.
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Thanks mentioning “incrediblehelp” guys. I will agree with your statements on PR and how I feel. I cant put to much stock in number on the toolbar that is exported 3-4 times a year. Real PR (internal at Google) more than likely updates daily. When Andy says duplicate content can effect PR, I guess that may be true. What I feel duplicate content is really effecting is your ranking placement on Google, regardless of PR number.
What I have seen lately that truly effects your rankings as it applies to duplicate content is the description tag. If Google sees this tag as being even marginally duplicated across multiple pages, you will find these pages put into the Supplemental Index so fast, you wont have time to worry about PR.
Look forward to more video highlights and info from the conference.
Jaan
[...] Original post by mike@webpronews.com (WebProNews.com) [...]