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Today for Cliff Notes Tuesday I'm going to be going over chapter three of Paddy Moogan's
Link Building Book entitled "What You Need to Know About Google Page Ranks." So very
exciting chapter, I know. And we're going to be going through some of Paddy's own opinions
and historical information about PageRank and how it came to be and also some really
good practical applications.
So to begin with, the first thing that Paddy mentions and continues to bring up throughout
the chapter is that he believes that PageRank is a metric that gets too much focus by the
SEO and larger digital marketing community. That doesn't mean that it shouldn't be looked
at at all. It's definitely important, but it's just one of many important metrics and
alone it doesn't give you a great indication of what's going on. But it is really important
to understand some core concepts about PageRank in terms of how it works, specifically how
it influences what you do in SEO. And also there are some good, useful applications for
it.
So to start off with, PageRank was invented by Larry Page and that's actually where it
gets its name from. A lot of people wrongly believe that PageRank comes from referring
to a web page, but in fact it comes from Larry Page's last name. So he originally introduced
the concept of PageRank in a paper that he wrote in 1999, so quite a while ago. It's
been around for a while.
Basically PageRank is scored on a scale of one to ten, ten being the best or the highest.
And what it basically defines is for a given page, it's a score based on the number and
quality of links pointing to that page. So what we commonly look at as SEOs every day
is actually a metric called toolbar PageRank, or it's what it's come to be named. And you
can find toolbar PageRank by using various browser plug-ins for Chrome and for Firefox,
but there are some really important caveats to remember about toolbar PageRank. First
of all, it's not the live PageRank. So it's not a completely accurate, up to date PageRank.
It's only updated every few months and the numbers are rounded. In actuality, real PageRank
is a very long decimal, which is what allows Google to effectively rank the billions of
pages that it's giving PageRank to, versus just an interval digit one to ten, and it's
also a very fluid score and it's updated constantly. So that's really important to keep in mind
that when you are looking at toolbar PageRank, it is just that -- toolbar PageRank, not actual
PageRank.
So all of these factors lead to it not being a completely reliable metric on its own. However,
the next section of this chapter, Paddy goes on to define some useful applications. So
the first use Paddy talks about is using it to check and/or influence how Google crawls
your site. So one thing we know about Google, and Google has said publicly, is that they
do use PageRank to determine how they're going to crawl your site. Actually if you look at
this graph down here, this is something that Google has put out. So how does Google crawl
your site? Basically you can see this inverse relationship here with PageRank, so in a decreasing
order of PageRank. So that's really important to remember because it can give you an indicator
of how Google is crawling and therefore caching your own website.
The application for this is you can use PageRank by checking PageRank on the different pages
around your site, at different levels of pages, category pages, product-level pages, to understand
how PageRank is being distributed throughout your site. So the most important thing to
know here is that you're making sure that the most important pages, the pages that you
want to show up in the SERP for really important key terms, have good PageRank and that would
indicate that they're being crawled and cached regularly by Google.
The other thing you want to highlight is looking for areas on your site that have little or
no PageRank. This probably means that Google isn't valuing them as highly, isn't caching
and crawling those pages are regularly, so you might need to fix the link flow there
if those are in fact important pages. The other thing you can do in this application
is combine this information with server log file analysis to understand what's not being
crawled very much and then, again, apply that and address your PageRank flow accordingly
to make sure Google is crawling the most important pages.
The second use that Paddy touches on is using PageRank for link prospecting and filtering.
So he really emphasizes again here, this should not be a hard limit. So using it like a rule
like, "I'm not even going to consider reaching out to sites that are under a PageRank four,"
would be kind of silly, because you could potentially be missing some really valuable
relationships there. And, again, it doesn't completely define what a potential link from
that page could do for you site. So he does say you can use it to filter. If you have
very large unmanageable lists of potential prospecting sites, you can use it to filter
it down. But again, it should not be used as the only metric to make that decision about
link building prospects.
The third use is using PageRank as a rough indicator of the quality of incoming links
to your site. So obviously this goes hand in hand with the link prospecting one. And
a really good post that Paddy mentions in this is from Richard Baxter at SEOgadget,
so check that out if you have a chance. And basically a good use for here is you can find
your lower quality links, see how that quality is decreasing or increasing over time, and
potentially find links that you might want to remove, or just using those scores in analysis
purposes. So after highlighting all of these applications, again Paddy mentions that PageRank
should always be combined with other metrics and when it is it can lead to good link analysis.
All right so the next section of the chapter is on PageRank sculpting. So that might cause
some of you to recoil in fear or maybe some of you to get really excited. It's definitely
a hot topic among the SEO community and still is today. So basically, PageRank sculpting
refers to controlling the flow of PageRank between the pages of your site. And that can
be both ways, so that can be increasing the flow to really important pages like category
and product-level pages that you want to rank well in the SERPs, but similarly it can be
preserving PR on certain pages as well. So both controlling the flow going out of pages
as well as coming in to particular pages.
Google has said -- because this is a tactic that was kind of used and exploited by SEOs
back in the day -- that this no longer works. They said that they've updated the algorithm
and it can overcome former tactics that SEOs would use to sculpt their PageRank on their
websites. However, it is something definitely still good to look at. Paddy really encourages
you to use this to just focus on enabling flow to key pages through things that should
be good practices for your website anyway, in terms of SEO and just user experience.
So things like really good site structure for both users and search engines, good navigation,
good information architecture. And also, just making sure that your key pages are close
to the home page, but still findable. So if it makes sense for them to be close to the
home page, then they should be there.
All right, so then the final area of this chapter covers why is Google the best at search
results? Why are they the leader and why, consistently, are their results the best?
Why are they the most relevant? So the first thing that Paddy highlights is links. They
were the first search engine to use links when everyone else was relying completely
on keyword relevance and really stuffing keywords into websites. Google starting using links.
And of course this was all inspired by Larry Page and his original PageRank paper, which
you should definitely give a read if you ever have a minute.
So the way that Larry Page originally compared this concept to was citations in University
papers. So he noticed among his schooling that people would include citations if they
wanted to reference other writings or studies that they found appropriate and also influential.
So I wanted to read a quote on that really quickly. Larry Page said, "It turns out, people
who win the Nobel Prize have citations from 10,000 different papers. A large number of
citations in scientific literature," he said, "means your work was important, because other
people thought it was worth mentioning." So that's where originally this whole concept
came from. Basically the first thing Google realized, or Larry Page realized, is that
it's really hard to understand what makes good content. So links enabled them to do
that in a really scalable way, to understand what's not only the best content, but the
most influential.
Another really important concept here that Larry Page noted right from the start was
while links are important, not all links are created equal and they should be valued differently.
So a good quote on that is, "The Google search engine has two important features that help
it to produce high precision results. First, it makes use of the link structure of the
Web to calculate a quality ranking for each web page. This ranking is called PageRank
and is described in detail in another section. Second, Google utilizes links to improve search
results." So basically what he was saying is we look at this overall structure of the
Web not only to say how many links are pointing to you, but that page that's pointing to you,
how many links are pointing to them? And similarly. And that's what we refer to in today's current
SEO world as link neighborhoods, most often.
So then what this establishes, it makes the Web democratic. Everyone has a vote and that
all goes into determining what are the most influential pages that should rank well. And
why this is a good system is it scales really well. Obviously the Web has billions and billions
of pages, so it works for that. And it also gives a score with a lot of confidence behind
it, because it's looking at an overall graph of how pages are linking to each other, not
just one level or one cross section.
The other concept that this chapter refers to is random surfing, which is basically looking
at the user journey. So if somebody were to click into a website and then click somewhere
else and click somewhere else, whatever that path is that they would follow through links
actually on the pages. And then whatever page that they would end up on, that page would
be considered more important. So it's basically saying the user experience there, through
links, would determine the importance of a page as well.
The second thing that makes Google results better than everyone else's, or has in the
past, is that they do use anchor text as a determinant as well. So this helps Google
determine the context of a particular page. So basically when links are going into a page,
Google looks at the anchor text that's linking there and that helps them determine what that
page is relevant about. So a really good quote on that is, "The text of links is treated
in a special way in our search engine. Most search engines associate the text of a link
with the page that the link is on. In addition, we associate it with the page the link points
to."
So we all understand anchor text and I think we take it a little bit for advantage, but
originally back in the day, other search engines were just looking at an anchor text as additional
content on that page, not saying this is actually a reference to what they're linking out to.
And so that's what Google additionally incorporated. So when this first came out as a major ranking
factor for Google, SEOs definitely exploited this. And that's why you see so many backlink
portfolios nowadays that are very, very unbalanced in this sense. So Google has definitely reigned
that in. It's still a major ranking factor, but especially recently, in 2012 obviously,
the Penguin updates have really addressed uneven and unbalanced anchor text to try to
limit the ways that SEOs can use this to their advantage.
So that is pretty much the whole chapter and a lot of good information there. So definitely
if you do have time I would read the chapter because it's pretty helpful and certainly
check out Larry Page's paper on PageRank as well if you time. Thanks so much.