Oct 14, 2008

Google uses 200+ things to rank a page other than pagerank


The source of this post is the discussion that aroused after the recent page rank update by Google.This time most of the bloggers and webmasters found that their page rank are dropped in spite of nothing wrong.They followed almost every thing that Google told them to do like no paid links,nofollow tag etc. but now they are confused how Google determines Page rank.
First of all,what is toolbar page rank
Two entirely different things are called “PageRank”. There’s the Google toolbar PageRank, which is represented by integers 1 through 10, and then there’s the internal PageRank number that Google uses as one of its many ranking factors. When I say PageRank doesn’t matter, I’m talking about the toolbar PageRank. The internal PageRank that Google uses does matter, but it’s far from only thing that matters.
At the simplest level, PageRank (both toolbar and internal) is a measure of a page’s link popularity. How many links does a page have and how authoritative are those links?
So guys don't worry about this update because Matt cutts says

It's just a toolbar PageRank update. Even if you don't show much PageRank,
Google still has 200+ other signals we use in our ranking. It's definitely
common to see lower-PageRank sites ranking above higher-PageRank sites--which
tends confuses the people who obsess too much about PageRank and who don't focus
on other factors that search engines might use to rank pages.

This is why sometimes lower page ranked sites are shown upper in the results compared to high page rank sites.But then why Google shows this toolbar pagerank ? Outer pagerank is just a delicate balance that Google has to maintain of giving as much information as possible to web site owners, while not giving away enough to let spammers impact the quality of search results.


Google link units