It’s been quite a while since I talked about Search Engine Optimization. Well, if you have been paying attention to the industry, you would realize that Google’s PageRank has been overwhelmingly devalued and it seems that PR has very little to do with how well you rank anymore. In fact, it has been devalued for over a year already. The reason why a lot of people is taking note that the PR devaluation is because of the recent public PR update by Google - a lot of webpages had their PR cut. Some webpages dropped from a PR7 to a PR4 in just one little update. Probably a lot of webmasters are cursing and swearing at their recent drop. I am pretty sure their revenue from selling high PageRank links has dropped a lot as well.
So I am sure what you are interested to know is what now? What’s Google’s great plan for the future of Search Engines? Sadly, it’s the same old thing - links. Links are still the most important aspect of Search Engine Optimization. Although PR has everything to do with links, the value of the link and the anchor text is still very important. And the content of the site which has the link is also important. Related sites will probably carry more weight in the eyes of Google. It tells Google what that link and the site it is pointing to is all about. And it is off-site, less easy to manipulate than on-site factors. And just when you expect big changes from Google! To tell you the truth, Search Engine Technology have become stagnant. You can see all these by just looking at Google and what it has been doing for the past few months - buying up some companies which are not directly related to Search Engine technologies. The most famous purchase is YouTube, and we know that it’s just a popular video hosting site. Nothing to do with Search Engines. I would expect more of the same from Google in the coming months (and years).
If you have been using Search Engines recently, I am sure you didn’t find much of an improvement in your results, right? What more can I say? Big companies often grow too big for their own good and now, we are the ones who has to suffer.
I’m not so sure about pagerank having been devalued as much as suspecting the probability of other criteria gaining more prominence. So sure, relatively speaking, you could say it’s been devalued. But it seems to me parts of the SEO community are going overboard with this assumption and seemingly completely writing off pagerank, while still considering backlinks to be of value.
But this thinking would be inconsistent, since pagerank is a measure of link popularity (with link value in the mix), so it would be absurd to, on the one hand, say that pagerank means nothing while, on the other, still regarding backlinks to be of value.
My thinking is that given an exact search term inside content of a page, with exactly the same keyword proximity, the same vote added by anchor text and keyword neighbourhood, etc in pages from two different sites, the one with the higher pagerank must win! Don’t you think?
Welll, Pagerank is the value assigned by Google and this value is actually based on the “value” of the links that are pointing to the site. If a webpage has a high PageRank, and all things considered, the most probable conclusion is that it has a lot of links and many of these links are highly regarded by Google. Thus you are correct that PageRank is an indication of how a site should rank. But it’s just an indication. I am pretty sure that a high PageRank site (the entire site) is indeed more valued in the eyes of Google than one with a low PageRank. There is no doubt about it.
But let’s take an example of a webpage with 1000 good “valued” links but with the anchor text “bunny shoes” and a PR of 6 and another site with perhaps 50 poor valued links with the anchor text “Authority Sites” and a PR of 2. Very likely that the one with the PR of 2 will win if you search for “Authority Sites”.
Yes, using your criteria, it is correct. The one with the higher PageRank will definitely win. If one day, Adobe or Apple website puts a single webpage with just 3 words “Authority Sites Blog”, I am sure it will beat this site hands down. But I need to stress, PageRank is just an indication, but it’s not an important ranking criteria.
Indeed the one with more of the targeted anchor text should win, and in your example of a three-word term where you’ve got the keyword proximity waxed, higher pagerank’d sites that don’t have the keyword proximity nor density nor focus really shouldn’t be able to knock you off your perch, while an even lower pagerank’d page that’s got their anchor text, keyword proximity etc even more waxed than you do might very well do so!
So when you’ve got a number of sites that are heavily competitive on a certain search term, with each of them having SEO’d their pages as professionally as can be as far as the design, content and architecture is concerned, then we pretty much find that the only things left for them to do to try beat the other is to 1) Gain more backlinks with relevant anchor text, at the same time to 2) increase pagerank to try set themselves apart from the others.
So maybe not an important ranking criteria if you don’t want it to be, but if you’re competing heavily on search terms with heavily-SEO’d sites that also have their ducks (and octopus dogs) in a row, then it becomes not just an important ranking criteria, but a crucial one, especially if your business is mission-critically dependent on Google traffic.
But yes, anchor text in backlinks does appear to be worth a whole lot more as you’ve shown, and I would add to that keyword neighbourhood and positioning too. For example, having a backlink with anchor text “authority sites” isn’t going to be very effective on a page that’s primarily about “bunny shoes” as what it would be within the actual content all about authority sites and related.
But I would also suspect that a higher pagerank’d site, with a healthy filtering of its pagerank down into lower-level pages is likely to be indexed on more search terms than an equally text-rich site of similar size with a pagerank of zero. Wouldn’t you think?
lol! We are really going overboard here! But it’s a good discussion.
For the last part, yes, a high pagerank website will most likely be ranked better than for websites with a less pagerank. But what I am saying is PageRank is just an indication. A high pagerank site (especially those with PR7-9) will almost certainly win hands down, but it’s not mainly due to the PageRank itself, but due to the number of links and how Google considers a site as “authority” site..