Pagerank Or Relevancy

Writen by CY Tang

Pagerank has been a thing some webmasters look for in their life. Some people are even willing to pay for it. Some believes that pagerank can get their websites ranked higher on the result page. This article will explain whether Pagerank is more important or relevancy comes first.

So, What is Pagerank and how does it work?

PageRank is a number that represents how important a web page is online. Google knows it when one page has a link to another, which it casts a vote to the arriving page. The more votes the page get, the more important the page must be. Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Google calculates a page's importance from the votes cast for it. How important each vote is is taken into account when a page's PageRank is calculated.

PageRank is calculated based on number of and quality of inbound links. These are links from within the site and links from outside the site. The following is the equation for calculating a page's PageRank. Read more about PageRank calculation.

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + ... + PR(tn)/C(tn))

So, if I have a PR6 website and I put a link on the webpage, pointing to a website with PR0, three months later, the latter will have PR4 or PR5, usually PR5. It's that easy. You can download and install Google Toolbar to check on a website's pagerank.

Does high pagerank guarantee you good ranking? I would definitely say it has some level of importance or Google will not be updating PageRank every three or four months! The fact is that, PageRank today is a small factor in Google's algorithm. Google has trained its spider stronger and smarter now that a high pagerank site with less related content will rank lower than a high relevancy website with lower pagerank. Let's do a real life analysis. I am querying Google search engine for the keyword "best web host", and these are the top 10 results shown:

Here, we see that 100best-free-web-space.com is ranked #1 by Google, with PR6, whereas webhostdir.com with PR7 is ranked at #3! Clear evidence that having higher PR does not guarantee a higher ranking. So, let's analyze which site has relevancy closer to "best web host". Looking at 100best-free-web-space.com, let us try to find some reasons why the site is more related to "best web host". First thing I can see is, it has "Best" and "Web" words in its title. The site has 0 appearance of "best web host", but if we seperate this keyword into three seperated "best", "web" and "host", you will see that the site has them widespread. For the body text, it has 73 "web", 22 "host" and 6 "best" words out from 1076 words, giving a total of 9.4% density. Not only that, the site even has bold text of "web" and "host" in the body. Of course, relevancy of a site cannot be concluded by simply looking at the homepage, there are more factors under it, such as content of its internal pages and outbound sites, etc. But, at least at this stage, it is very clear that, relevancy does stand infront of pagerank when you talk about ranking.

In conclusion, PageRank is a good indicator of how long a site has been established (old sites tend to have higher PR than the new ones) and how many sites are actually linking to it. However, it is certainly not worth to overwhelme it. Some webmasters sell text link at a price of $500 per month just because they have PR8 on their site, which is absolutely ridiculous. Take the time and money to do something else more meaningful and effective such as content writing and relevancy building.

CY Tang is a search engine profession, helping websites to get ranked higher with better search engine visibility. Visit his seo blog for any seo tips and advice.