PageRank ranks your
website according to relevance in search results.
During your research into SEO you may have come across
references to PageRank. PageRank
was developed by the founders of Google while they were at Stanford
University. PageRank is basically a ranking system
that monitors the popularity of websites in order to return the
correct results for a search query.
As the co-founder of
Google, Larry Page, once said, “The perfect search engine is
something that understands exactly what you mean and gives you back
exactly what you want”. While no search engine can claim to be
perfect, PageRank is Google’s attempt at providing
searchers with the information they need.
The idea is that
all web pages have some inherent importance and that the link
structure of the internet can point out pages of lesser or
greater value. When many pages link to a web page, it is given a
PageRank. Pages with a high PageRank that link to
your page give more authority and a higher ranking to your site.
PageRank thus determines the authority
of a page on the internet. If a page is linked to by many quality
websites, it will have a high PageRank, and thus
more authority. If a page with a good authority rating (and
thus a high PageRank) links to your page, some of that authority is
transferred to you, and increases your PageRank
more than links from low PageRank websites would.
Apart from the Googlebots that crawl the
web and return results for your search, the following is also looked
at:
Relevance. As well
as PageRank, the Googlebots use more than 200 signals to order
websites. These algorithms are updated on a constantly by Google.
Relevance is important because the more relevant your content to a
search query, the more likely you are to be on the first page of the
search results. Relevance affects your organic ranking.
Comprehensiveness. Google launched in
1998 with just 25 million pages, which even then was a small
fraction of the web. Today it indexes billions and billions of web
pages. This means that your website can get lost on the internet.
Search engine optimisation helps your website become more noticeable
on the web by allowing for comprehensive and relevant content.
Freshness. In the early days,
Googlebots crawled the web every three or four months, which meant
that the information you found on Google typically was out of date.
Today the Googlebots continually crawl the web to ensure that you
can find the latest news, blogs and status updates minutes or even
seconds after they’re posted. This is why it is important for you to
keep your content fresh and update it regularly with news feeds, new
company profiles, etc.
Speed.
Google search engineers are always working not just on new features,
but ways to make search even faster. This is why content on your
website that slows down load-time should be avoided. If you cannot
grab a user’s attention within 7 seconds, they will move away from
your site.