Matt’s Musings

For about one year now, ever since Google lowered the boom on paid links and immediately devalued thousands of websites, the search engine giant’s PageRank algorithm has been minimized, even dismissed by search engine optimizers (SEO’ers) and other knowledgeable web folks. After all, your position in the SERPs (search engine results pages) for various key words and phrases is more important as is what your customers do when they find your site, namely read your information and convert to a sale or take some other desired action.

But, Google’s PageRank cannot be entirely dismissed as it has long been an accepted method by which people rate sites, as they put at least partial trust in Google’s ability to adequately pass judgment on any given site.

I only wish that I could give PageRank some respect these days; I’m just finding that it is increasingly more difficult to do that than ever before. To illustrate my point, please take a look at this site.

Darned if I know why, but this site went from PR3 to PR2 with the September 2008 update. Oddly, quite a few of my internal pages are ranked, some of which are also PR2. Those pages feature rather lengthy articles, lots of comments, and from what my Google Analytics tools reveal, thousands of hits. Sure, I used StumbleUpon to promote some of these pages, but I did get quite a bit of direct responses in the form of valuable comments. Appropriately, Google awarded those pages a PR2 which seems to tell me that this site should have retained at least its previous PR3 ranking, if not better.

Of course, I’m prejudiced when it comes to this site as I think its the best blog on the internet.

Seriously, I know that I could post more often, but I’d rather use this blog for the occasional, thoughful post than worry about shear numbers. Anyway, I do manage several other blogs which need frequent attention, thus the relegation of this site to its once-a-week posting status.

What is impossible to quantify is the entire ranking algorithm in the first place. We assume that if people are linking to your site and you’re providing links to their site, that Google gives at least some weight to these links especially if a site carries some sort of authority with it. Thus, if I’ve added “X” amount of rankable content since the last update, then its stands to reason that my site would have actually increased in ranking or at least held its own.

Instead, all of that hard work meant that many of my individual articles received a ranking, but the home page was devalued for some unknown reason. FYI: I don’t sell links and I can’t imagine that this site was penalized for that offense. What I do suspect is that some of my inbound links have been devalued which would have forced the main URL’s ranking downward.

Yes, I know, stop worrying about PageRank and get back to writing good, linkable content and everything will take care of itself some day. Maybe this is true, but short of deleting the Google toolbar, I’ll be left wondering what really happened until the next PageRank export takes place which likely won’t happen before January 2009.

Filed under: Vendo