SEO: Looking Past the Page Rank to Increase Page Exposure through the Search Engine
The Internet has allowed access to a global network of information. Over its 25 years of existence, it has created an expansive network connecting millions of sites into a cohesive whole. In general the web can be viewed as a network with individual websites representing Nodes and hyper links representing the edges connecting them. This general structure of the web is what formulates the basis of the process of calculating the Page Rank of a page.
As we learned in class the general process of calculating page ranks is a recursive procedure involving hub and authority sites. The authority sites receive a higher score if they have more reputable (high page rank hub) sites linking to them, and a site (hub) becomes more valued if it links to valuable (authority) sites. It is important to note a specific website can be both a hub and an authority. Generally having more reputable links from a hub site will make a certain (authority) web page have higher page rank. This is the general premise of the calculation of page rank, however just having a ton of reputable inlinks (sites linking to a page) will not guaranteed a page to consistently appear in searches. This is because the page rank of a website is not the sole factor in determining the results of a query; especially for more robust organic search algorithms like the one employed by Google.
Although the page rank of an individual page is a useful gauge of the overall quality of a page, the direct association made by most people between a high page rank and a general high presence in organic search results is flawed. Or more specifically higher presence to the relevant/intended audience of the website. Oftentimes it can be seen that clients are overly focused on increasing their page rank while not seeing the broader picture in improving content and associative linking. Otherwise if it were the case that high page ranked sites are always the output of a query, then the results of a search would always be page rank 10 sites (Google ranks pages 1-10).
However since the page rank is only one attribute that is considered in the function that calculates the search rank for web pages for a given query, having a high page rank will not guaranteed successful consistency in searches. Focusing solely on page rank does not factor in the relevance of the whole site and specifically the context of the keywords of the “anchor” links that link to your site, which are both important factors in the search algorithm. In an example similar to the one given in the article, two companies Nike and Adidas want to increase the exposure of the sales of their online running shoes line. The company Nike who is trying to increase their traffic to their running shoe selling page, have gotten 10 highly ranked pages to link to their site with the context of the anchor link being “Nike.” This will increase the search score for the Nike homepage specifically for the keyword “Nike” instead of “running shoe” which is what they actually want to increase, so despite increasing the overall page rank it will not significantly help raise the exposure from the search engine to the running shoe line page, when a user is searching for “running shoes” on Google. On the other hand the Adidas online marketing team has gotten a bunch of mid page rank running sites linking to the homepage of Adidas, and the context of the anchor link is running shoes. The linkings from the mid rank sites would actually increase the search rank of the Adidas web page more than the linkings from the high rank pages because of the increased relevance for users querying “buying running shoes” with the anchor link context of the running sites to Adidas and the keyword “running shoe.” This example showcases the importance of relevant linking, more so than just solely page ranking, in targeting the increased exposure of a site for a specific purpose; in this example being trying to raise awareness to the new running shoes on line.
Another key idea for optimizing the search exposure for a website is the relevance of the overall content of the page. An example given in the article is that let’s say a user queries “Civil War” there may be a few articles on the Civil War written in the New York Times dispersed throughout the Times website which is a highly ranked web page, but the google search algorithm will not return these articles as search results because the overall Times website is not relevant to what the user is searching for which is the “Civil War.” This distinction in the information on a specific page and the content of the overall site is also very critical in the process of how Google’s search algorithm determines the relevancy and accuracy of the information presented to what the user actually wants. So a key idea to draw from this is specific keyword queries in google search return not just sites with the keyword found within a page, but it will be sites who’s overall content is relevant to the queried input. So what might actually be displayed for querying “Civil War” are mid page ranked pages which focus solely on Civil War information.
This goes to show that to truly optimize your page for exposure through a search engine goes much further than the page rank. It is oftentimes mistaken to tackle the problem of gaining exposure to your site by solely trying to raise the page rank of your page. Page rank is only one of many metrics that can reliably land your page in search results when your site is actually useful to the user. Ultimately, maximizing page rank is done to expose your site to its intended audience. Thus it is important to realize there are many different factors that play into getting your site recognized with a search engine. Simply examining Page Rank is only scratching the surface to the true depth of search engine optimization.
http://searchengineland.com/what-is-google-pagerank-a-guide-for-searchers-webmasters-11068