PageRank in Search Engine Optimization
searchengineland.com/crawl-budget-url-scheduling-might-impact-rankings-website-migrations-255624
While many people have heard of CEOs, few have heard of SEO. With the only the difference of a letter, the context becomes entirely different. CEOs are chief executive officers, while SEO refers to search engine optimization. In this article, the author discusses how website migrations cause the ranking of the website (in search engines) to drop and why that is. Website migration is when a company or organization decides to transfer their website from one web domain to another. One common way to fix this is to just redirect every page from from the old address to the new with a 301 permanent redirect; this way, if someone tries on accident to go to the old site, it will just automatically redirect them. Naturally this seems like it would make the page less attractive to search engines. However, Google has (relatively) recently stated that “using a 301, 302 or 30x redirect of any kind will not result in a loss of PageRank.”
If this is true, then why would the rank of the page drop? The article references “page importance”as a way that also influences how often the page is “crawled” to. Crawling of a site is when Google or any search engine indexes through all the pages that exist on the internet to store keywords, etc. so that the page will pop up when they run their search algorithm. Naturally, if your page isn’t indexed, it won’t show up as a result on a search engine. Especially if your website domain has been changed, you want to make sure that Google has your new domain showing up in search results.
Now, the interesting thing is that PageRank which we talked about in class is not the same thing as page importance. Although page importance may include PageRank, the author clarifies that there are many more factors that Google has to consider when judging page importance – for example: the location in site (ie. home page vs. subpage). Still, it is clear that PageRank must play a key part in this whole system, which ties what we learned about in class intimately with search engine optimization.