Pagerank And Search Engine Rankings - The Difference

Many people working in SEO or looking to get into doing SEO on their website believe that the PageRank of their website will determine where they are ranking in the search engines. The aim of this article is to look at that point in more detail and explain away some common misconceptions.

The first thing to know is where PageRank actually came from. It was invented by Larry Page who was one of the founders of Google and in fact the word Page in the name comes from the fact that it is names after Larry Page and nothing to do with a web page at all. The definition of PageRank supplied by Wikipedia is below:

"PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references."

There are people out there that think the higher your PageRank the higher you will come in the search engines however this is not the case. Try to search for any keyword you can think of and look at the PageRank of the top 10 results. It is unlike the 2 things are correlated so it is clear to see that increasing your PageRank will not necessarily increase the position of your website in the search engines.

So does this mean PageRank should be completely ignored by anyone that is looking to increase their search engine ranking. Well the best way to answer that is to look at Googles definition of PageRank which according to Wikipedia is the following:

"PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important" "

Most people involved in SEO are aware that the number of links and the quality of the links to your website are important in the ranking of your website. However there are a lot of other factors that go along side this element that are used to determine the ranking of your website in the search engines.

It is clear to see that PageRank will give you the linking quality of your site but it will not give you an indication as to the position you will come for certain keywords. After all, if you are a website selling beauty products you will not appear at the top for hardware even if the PageRank of your site is higher than the sites in that category.

On conclusion it can be said that your PageRank alone will not determine the position of your website in the search engines. However it is a good indication of the quality of your website and as search engines are looking for high quality sites that is not a bad things. The higher you can get the page rank if your site the easier it will be to optimise your website for your chosen terms as the search engines will already like your website.