Google and its Page Rank

The search engine Google has transformed search as we know and it all started with its Page Rank formula. The idea was to give each page a value based on other sites linking to that page, the better the quality and quantity of links the higher the page rank. But as a page increases it own page rank and page that is linked to from it, also gain from that high page rank value.

The results have meant that many SEO amateurs and professional have taken page rank as the be all and end all of linking strategies, meaning that they would prefer to receive a link from a site that had a high page rank rather than one that was relevant to the site and helped its readers.

You can tell what page rank a webpage has by installing the Google toolbar and in options selection the relevant tick box option. Every time you browse a page you will see a green bar on the Google toolbar that will give an indication of that particular page’s page rank, but it is not quite what it seems. First of all the result you see (out of 10) is not live and in fact is just a snap shot of sometime ago. Just this weekend much of the UK has seen their toolbars update at what appears to be a page rank update but in fact even these new results are still probably a snapshot sometime a few weeks ago.

The next point is even though we see page rank as a score out of 10, it is very likely that Google has a more accurate scoring system, so it could be out of 1000 or broken down into decimal points. Even with all this inaccuracy it is amazing how much SEO work and money changes hands based on these scores on the page rank bar.

Google tells you not to worry about things like this and only do things that help your visitor. This is a true fact but in highly competitive fields chances are you will have to do both. Ensure you have a compelling unique site for your visitors and find away to get relevant and high page rank sites to link to you. My advice is to aware of what page rank is and how it can help in SEO, but don’t let it rule everything you do. You may find little results.

What Are Search Engines

It wasn’t that long ago that if you needed to find a business or a service, you picked up the yellow pages and let your fingers do the walking. Now the internet has taken over and even yellow pages are visited more online that through the printed page.

So the natural way to find just about anything in the 21st century is to first visit a search engine, enter what you are looking for and hope that the technology and calculations behind the website will deliver you on screen what you are looking for.

Well that is the principle anyway. But in reality when we action a search we often find different results and so the users tend to have their favourite search engine because of previous success. The big 3 search engines are Google Yahoo and live (aka MSN owned my Microsoft). All 3 use different algorithms (calculations) to deliver the search results, hence different information.

In the war within these 3, Google is winning by a mile, even though they are the newest in the market. It is believed they have around 56% of the total search market within the USA, but this figure increases dramatically in certain other countries. The story of Google is phenomenal, making one of the world’s most successful ventures and to some in the search engine optimization industry or where their income relies on search engine placement, world domination.

Yahoo is normally placed second, still quite and achievement and seems to have a dedicated following. Just as Google is successful, following up just behind yahoo is Live, which considering is supplied automatically with XP or Vista operation system, which is on most of the worlds computers, and owned an run by Microsoft, it is surprising how little progress against the other 2 it has made, even with substantial investment.

To be good at search engine optimization you have to understand how each of these search engines work. A quality seo company will do this every day, consistently keeping abreast all changes. Take Google for example; in 2007 they implemented over 450 changes to their algorithm. In short what looks like simple websites, are in fact a directory of the world. But for you seo guy out there, there is only 10 results that matter and that is the first 10 results on the first page of any search result, nothing else should matter.