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What is PageRank?

SEO Fargo ND — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 02:34:02 +0000

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 determines 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.

From here on in, we’ll occasionally refer to PageRank as “PR”.

Notes:
Not all links are counted by Google. For instance, they filter out links from known link farms. Some links can cause a site to be penalized by Google. They rightly figure that webmasters cannot control which sites link to their sites, but they can control which sites they link out to. For this reason, links into a site cannot harm the site, but links from a site can be harmful if they link to penalized sites. So be careful which sites you link to. If a site has PR0, it is usually a penalty, and it would be unwise to link to it.

SEO 101

SEO Fargo ND — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 01:09:53 +0000

If you need to know:

• what a meta tag is and how to use them
• what keywords are
• how many keywords to use
• where keywords should be placed and why
• what title tags are
• what alt tags are
• what header tags are
• what a sitemap is and how to use the different kinds
• why links can help or hurt you
• why commenting is a good thing

then this site will help you.

Everyone that knows the above and completely understands it AND uses them does NOT need the information I share.

Google’s Algorithm

SEO Fargo ND — Sat, 06 Dec 2008 09:07:48 +0000

GoogScore = (KW Usage Score * 0.3) + (Domain Strength * 0.25) + (Inbound Link Score * 0.25) + (User Data * 0.1) + (Content Quality Score * 0.1) + (Manual Boosts) - (Automated & Manual Penalties)

KW Usage Factors:

KW in title tag
KW in header tags
KW in document text
KW in internal links pointing to the page
KW in domain and/or URL

Domain Strength

Registration history
Domain age
Strength of links pointing to the domain
Topical neighborhood of domain based on inlinks & outlinks
Historical use & links pattern to domain

Inbound Link Score

Age of links
Quality of domains sending links
Quality of pages sending links
Anchor text of links
Link quantity/weight metric (Pagerank or a variation)
Subject matter of linking pages/sites

User Data

Historical CTR to page in SERPs
Time users spend on page
Search requests for URL/domain
Historical visits/use of URL/domain by users GG can monitor (toolbar, wifi, analytics, etc.)

Content Quality Score

Potentially given by hand for popular queries/pages
Provided by Google raters (remember Henk?)
Machine-algos for rating text quality/readability/etc

Obviously, this isn’t a perfect summation of the algorithm by any means, but I have a strong suspicion that if we were to see the exact algorithm in perfect form, we’d see that a lot of these factors are strongly reflected in the weighting. There would most likely also be a lot of the factors from :

Keyword Use in Title Tag

Keyword Use in Body Text

Relationship of Body Text Content to Keywords (Topic Analysis)

Keyword Use in H1 Tag

Keyword Use in Domain Name

Keyword Use in Page URL

Keyword Use in H2, H3, H4 Tags

Keyword Use in Alt Tags and Image Titles

and so on

What do you think? Any big oversights or complete goofs in the above formula?

p.s. Yes – I do think Google is using manual boosts, particularly when the query is of a navigational nature and they’d like to place the source at #1, despite the fact that it might not be strong enough to rank there by itself.