Google PageRank Factors – What Are They Now?

Writing by Nick Stamoulis Tweet

Most SEO consultants pay little to the importance of Google PageRank these days and its relevance to ranking a website naturally in the search engines. However, the data used to determine Google PageRank can often be an indication of what direction your overall search engine optimization strategy should take.

Search Engine Roundtable has picked up on a thread from Webmaster World on the Changes Made To Google PageRank. The observations that they make in this post are interesting and the points made are thought provoking for sure.

The Webmaster World forum is still arguing many of the points. Looking at the points that were raised are:
1. Internal links and external links on the same page may not be splitting the Google PageRank vote equally.
2. Depending on the location of the link, Google PageRank may be weighted differently.
3. Multiple links to the same URL from the same page may not each get the same piece of the Page Rank vote.
4. “Run-of-site” external links, like Blogrolls, may now have diminished PageRank.
5. Links between domains that Google sees as “related” may have their PageRank significantly damped down. Possibly the same goes for sites that link to sub-domains.

These points all revolve around links and how the link juice is spread. It has been known for a while that Google doesn’t treat every internal and external links equally. Blogrolls have always been a little suspect when it comes to link value often being seen as a form of link exchange. Good search engine optimization programs now try to concentrate on content links with effective anchor text.

From the forum came an interesting comment on content and the relationship of duplicate content and how it affects Google PageRank for a website. Good white hat or clean SEO is aimed at getting pages rated highly within the search results pages. You can achieve a top 5 or top 10 placements and still have a low or even zero Google PageRank.

The danger when looking at factors that affect your PageRank is that you comprise your search ranking by altering your search engine optimization program. What affects PageRank may have a marginal effect on your search ranking, but obviously the two are determined separately using different algorithms. If they the same data was used for each calculation then the Google PageRank factors would be a strong indication of search rank – and it isn’t