Search Engine Optimization (SEO) for your website

PageRank, ShmageRank

Google’s PageRank is a measurement of a page’s worth based on the quantity and quality of both

incoming and outgoing links.The concept behind PageRank is that each link to a page constitutes

a vote, and Google has a sophisticated and automated way of tallying these votes, which includes

looking at a vast universe of interlinking pages. Google awards PageRank on a scale of 0 to 10;

a PageRank value of 10 is the most desirable and extremely rare.Like the Richter scale,the

PageRank scale is not linear,so the difference between 4 and 5 is much greater than the differ-

ence between 3 and 4.

More often than not, pages with high PageRank have higher Google rankings than pages with low

PageRank.And therein lies the link obsession.Throughout the SEO community, the scrambling for,

trading, and even selling of links became such a focus over the past several years that Google

modified its system and began to devalue certain kinds of links.It’s widely accepted, for example,

that links from content-deficient “link farm”websites do not improve a page’s PageRank, and get-

ting a link from a page with high PageRank but irrelevant content (say, a popular comic book site

that links to a forklift specifications page) won’t either.Google now displays updated PageRank

values at infrequent intervals to discourage constant monitoring.

It’s good to get links to your site, but obsessive link building to the point of excluding other areas

of SEO is a waste of time. Keep a holistic head on your shoulders and remember these points:

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Google’s ranking algorithm is not based entirely on inbound links.

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A high PageRank does not guarantee a high Google rank.

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A PageRank value viewed today may be up to three months old.

PageRank is still a fairly good indication of how Google regards your website’s pages, and you’ll

learn how to gather your own measurements in Your SEO Plan. But in the Right Now of SEO,think

of PageRank as a hobby, not a religion.

The Best of the Rest: Yahoo!, MSN, AOL, Ask

Taken as a group, the major non-Google search engines that we’re about to discuss

make up a larger percentage of the search market than Google, which means they

deserve your attention. This is even more true if your organization is looking for an

edge in a special area such as shopping, local, or mobile search. Non-Google search

engines allow you to fill out your website’s presence so that it is not overly dependent

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