Apr 15 2009
PageRank history and its importance in modern SEO
Working as an SEO programmer I regularly get asked questions about PageRank and having recently seen a PageRank update across many websites, I’d like to take this opportunity to discuss PageRank in terms of importance in modern search engine optimisation, based upon an article I recently read on the seomoz blog.
Google PageRank is simply an example of a ranking factor in Googles algorithm, PageRank is just one of a possible many, others include onpage content and domain authority.
Personally I feel PageRank these days has far less weight in the algorithm than in previous years, as it is no longer sufficient to simply manipulate your website’s PageRank to see an improvement in your ranking in Google, however I am not totally ruling out this factor in the equation, as Google still carries some relevancy, I feel less emphasis is applied to this factor in serps.
Onpage content relevance in terms of weight, generally speaking has not changed over the years so strategies which incorporate keywords in alt text, header tags and meta data, can still help to positively manipulate your rankings.
The most important finding is that domain authority has more relevance these days than in previous years. So factors like the age of the domain has more weight in the Google algorithm than in previous years, as we see more and more authority websites like technorati, stubleupon and digg have articles that compete naturally against Wikipedia and Amazon.
As we see Google making more and more data freely available we may see other quality signals such as search queries and traffic pattern estimates having more weight in the future and PageRank becoming further depreciated in weight.
Vipul
SEO Programmer
