Yesterday, Google began releasing an infrastructure update. This included a PageRank to the toolbar, and domain query results like “related:”, “link:” and “info:”. Matt Cutts commented on his blog with more details of the update.
His remarks included something that I would consider extremely significant to SEO:
“Having urls in the supplemental results doesn’t mean that you have some sort of penalty at all; the main determinant of whether a url is in our main web index or in the supplemental index is PageRank. If you used to have pages in our main web index and now they’re in the supplemental results, a good hypothesis is that we might not be counting links to your pages with the same weight as we have in the past. The approach I’d recommend in that case is to use solid white-hat SEO to get high-quality links (e.g. editorially given by other sites on the basis of merit).”
I have discussed what white hat techniques are, and how they should be approached. But the concern that I have is what is the true value of PageRank?
In a previous post of Matt’s, he stated:
“we slowed down external PageRank updates because if you do them more often than every 3-4 months, SEOs pay too much attention to the PageRank bar, and not enough to the over 100 other factors that go into our scoring. But several items really resonated with Googlers here.”
I can appreciate that, however, what is the weight that is attached to PageRank, and what is the weight of the other 100 or so?
I have covered PageRank many times in my posts and my thoughts are that PageRank does not matter. If your web page or website is more valuable than the rest, you will rank higher. I write and I build websites for others just like my blog, with the user in mind. I know that over time (another important factor in SEO), as I consistently focus on the user, the engines will continue to focus the user to my website(s).
To be direct and perfectly honest with all of you, I have the Google toolbar installed on my laptop, at home, and have not enabled the PageRank bar, however, at work the bar (and other important tools are).
What are your thoughts?
Should Google update PageRank more frequently?
Is PageRank all that Google says it is?
Can they at least put search into my reader? (They built their business on it, didn’t they?)
related posts >>
- Yahoo News – Search Index Update
- Yahoo! Announces Index Update
- Still No Beta or The New Version of Blogger
- Webmaster Guidelines Update
- How do you Spell Relief for BDA?
