After 10 months of silence, on the night of December 5-6 what we never expected happened: the PageRank update. The green bar update was not expected until 2014, according also to the words of Matt Cutts himself.
Although the webmaster guru had publicly announced that he would be surprised to see updates before next year, but that was not the case. So what must have happened?
Could it have been a strategic move not to reveal that changes were just around the corner? Unfortunately, we cannot make a trial of intentions, but we can say with certainty that Google’s historical value is not dead; on the contrary, it continues to be one of the benchmarks for backlinking activities. For the uninitiated, PageRank is a numerical value ranging from 0 to 10 assigned by Google not to the entire domain (as many people think) but to each individual page of our site. We should think of it as a real score, which determines the degree of authority of our website.
It happens more and more rarely that an increase in PageRank is directly proportional to an increase in Serp position. From an SEO perspective – and especially from a Marketing perspective – it is extremely wrong to consider PR as the only factor for the popularity and success of one’s site; there are obviously many others, and we find tangible proof of this by analyzing the Serp and noticing that often even domains with low scores are found in pro-privileged positions.
If you want to concretely analyze your favorite Serps in terms of PR and more, the excellent addons for Firefox/Chrome SEO Quake is for you, which will show you a useful toolbar for each snippet with interesting values to compare at a glance.
Less PageRank and more quality links
With this latest update, then, what changes? Actually very little, Google has kept updating its index as a routine operation to convey the authority of certain sites that were anxiously awaiting their recognition.
Actually this like so many updates could make people think that PR is a value assigned with a precise or almost precise cadence; alas big mistake that too! It would be like saying that we age 1 year only on our birthday while the months before are not accounted for (the example is not the best but I couldn’t think of a better one). PR is a constantly changing value; even as we are reading this page the PR is there varying, masked by the public value that Big G kindly offers us every 3 months (or whenever it sees fit). This could also be a plausible explanation for how sites that seemingly have a lower value than ours rank better than we do; although the general trend has led over time to think that the explanation lies in the fact that this value has lost-or even never had-“power” in ranking.
It is interesting to reflect on what Udi Manber writes in 2008 on the official Google blog:
”
The most famous part of our ranking algorithms is PageRank, an algorithm developed by Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google. PageRank is still used today, but only as part of a larger system “. Google then is able to tell us roughly how authoritative a page can be considered; but as he himself states this value has now lost its leading role in the grand scheme. The suggestion, all things aside, is to continue to work on SEO without “fixating” on continually looking at its value until the next public update, not losing sight of the fact that our pages are in play every minute and not just when Google deigns to make it known to us.
If your site today has been rewarded with a position improvement, no doubt it is a good sign, but keep updating and trying, without resting on your laurels. Achieving a certain score does not mean that you can only go up, but given the many algorithmic changes in recent months you must also consider a possible descent.
In any case, those who believed in the death of PageRank must think again. It is by no means true that it no longer exists but the fact is that there are different forms of thinking: there are those who believe in the absolute authority of PageRank and those, on the other hand, who consider it as one among many evaluation parameters. After several experiences in which I have had the opportunity to confirm both schools of thought, my humble opinion is that regardless of how much this value may influence our SEO strategies, once every three months, we have a small but useful indication of how our site is progressing in the eyes of Google; which in these dark times filled with Not Provided is not to be disdained. The latest update as we could see, missed the traditional deadlines, coming in 10 months late. The reasons? It is not known, but reflecting on the many changes and innovations brought to search in recent times, it was almost a given that the algorithm involved in PR calculation has undergone considerable refactoring to account for so much added material to be evaluated.
Just to get a clear picture we report the timeline of PR updates from 2007 to the present:
- December 6, 2013
- Feb. 4, 2013
- November 7, 2012
- August 2, 2012
- May 2, 2012
- Feb. 7, 2012
- November 7, 2011
- Week 1 August 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- January 2011
- April 2010
- December 31, 2009
- Oct. 30, 2009
- May 27/28, 2009
- June 2009
- April 1/2, 2009
- December 30-31, 2008
- September 27, 2008
- July 26, 2008
- April 29, 2008
- January 9, 2008
- October 26, 2007
- April 28, 2007
How to increase the value of PageRank?
We often hear that a site has a PR, when instead we have said that it is not the whole site that has a Page Rank value but it is the individual pages. In general, we always tend to define the PR of the site by the value that its homepage has, which is certainly the most important and well-valued page of all.
The increase in PR is mainly determined by theacquisition of quality links that, like generators in an electrical network, provide energy to the network by charging specifically our linked page, seen as a capacitor.
Obviously, the greater the authority and PR of the site that links to ours, the greater the Trust that will be partly transferred to us. It is more important, therefore, to work with a view to acquiring quality links rather than adopting a quantity-oriented strategy. When evaluating the page that will grant us the backlink, it is important to dwell not only on its PR but in parallel with the amount of links to other pages on it.
This is because the relationship between the Page Rank value of the “donor” page and the number of links to other pages on it strongly determines the amount of PR that will be transferred to the “destination” page. A page with another PR but with a considerable amount of links will transfer much less than a page with a lower PR but with many fewer links.
Another important rule to follow is that of link contextualization: that is, that links to your site come from sites that deal with similar or related topics. This will not only optimize the PR shift between the two sites but also provide a strong confidence for Google to attribute more authority to the link.
So it all comes down to external work on our site? Absolutely not. In any self-respecting power grid, the energy acquired must be well channeled and optimized to ensure a balanced and effective distribution to the entire internal structure. To simplify this concept, we can represent our site with a graph structure, where each node corresponds to a page containing inbound and outbound links.
If we also think in this light about the external sites from which we receive links, it is easy to see how the amount we receive as a gift must be wisely organized within our internal circuit through a reasoned and well-designed internal link structure.
That said, let’s look in detail at what it can take to best channel the acquired PR and ensure an increase in authority to all our site pages:
- First define a Keyword Density to select keys with a high efficiency index;
- Structuring the site’s menus and an optimized network of internal links that enable clear site navigability consistent with the chosen keywords, so that traffic is “recirculated.”
- in the backlinking phase, check that the linked anchor texts are well mixed between follow and nofollow, varying the keywords of greatest interest in a natural way;
- be careful not to saturate our pages with too many links within the same page and with the same keyword;
- use robots.txt to avoid indexing aggregate content pages such as classic Tag Cloud links or Blog category pages that affect the effectiveness of individual pages;
- Avoid linking to the same page the backlink came from or possibly link to a different page, perhaps with a nice nofollow.
In general, these are just a few tips on how to cherish and enhance the little treasure Google offers us. The real secret does not lie in simple value but in knowing how to share and create real interest in one’s site in order to generate Trust and natural quality links that are optimally directed to our site.
Page Rank and reasoning aside, the gift theory teaches that one must first and foremost know how to give before receiving; this is the only sound theory that I feel I can follow and recommend to those who still continue to make their reason for living the usual obvious and useless question:
But how can I be first ?!
