Webmasters: Stop Stressing About Lost Pagerank
September 22nd, 2008 by Adam
Many webmasters were up in arms back in October as Google seemingly reduced their Pagerank. This affected many millions of websites. Panic resulted as many webmasters were greatly concerned as to why this had happened and how they could restore their precious Pagerank back to their website.Why did this happen?
Lets look first at Pagerank and how it is predetermined. Pagerank is widely speculated to be calculated in accordance with the number and quality of incoming links to a website. It’s a complex formula that only Google knows, also noticing the importance of the page that the link originates from. Pagerank is measured on a scale of 1 to 10 but it is not a linear scale ie getting from 8 to 9 is a lot, lot harder than getting from 7 to 8. Also it is believed to include other factors such as the authority and trust of a website.
Pagerank is wrongly believed by many webmasters to be the main critical factor that determines their search engine ranking positions ( SERPS). In reality there are a huge amount of factors that Google looks at to determine the SERPS, Pagerank is just one of them although it can be a deciding factor if all other things are equal.
Over the last few years the effect has turned many webmasters into Pagerank junkies. They worry about their Pagerank and how to get links from other sites with higher Pagerank and they decline to link to sites with lower Pagerank etc etc. This has resulted in a whole industry of websites acquiring and selling links according to the Pagerank of the link page. As a result this has enraged sleeping dragon over at Google.Broadly it has been described that this readjustment of the Pagerank cause is as a result of Google penalising websites that are involved in the buying and selling of text links, with the aim of passing on Pagerank and hence improving their better SERPS.
It is also suspected that sites have lost Pagerank as a result of bad linking, broken linking and other general errors. The thinking behind this is to do with Trust and Authority - Google thinks that a site with broken links and links to “bad neighbourhoods” is not one that should get a high trust score.
So was this the definitive reason for the Pagerank meltdown?
No, it is unlikely that this was the sole underlying reason, as many many sites were affected that had no involvement in buying or selling links. It is much more likely that this was a complete overhaul or readjustments of Google’s Pageranks scoring systems, which has led to an across the board reassessment. The fact that so many experts have been jumping up and down about the trading of links as a reason, is a theory that Google are probably only too happy to let us believe. The fact is they do not like the buying and selling of links for the purposes of increasing SERPS, so they’re happy to let us believe that they’ve applied penalties to this, in the hope that it will deter webmasters from doing this in future. The real reasons will probably never be known.
So how can you increase your sites Pagerank?
- Continue to engage in an ongoing campaign of link building, obtaining links from sites with a similar theme to yours. Don’t get too concerned about Pagerank.
- Avoid dubious practices that Google frown upon such as buying and selling of text links. If you do buy text links for any other reason than to improve Pagerank, make sure the no follow tag is inserted in the link. However, it is much safer to avoid them totally.
- Make sure your site has no broken links - including links to other sites, and does not link to sites that may be considered bad , such as spammy sites and those involved in selling text links.
There are too many urban myths concerning Pagerank and the reality is it is not the “be all and end all”. Just concentrate on optimising your site and building incoming links, getting good content and applying a good relevant theme to your website and let everyone else stress about Pagerank. At the end of the day, it just isn’t that important.
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