Why high Page Rank websites don't appear at the top of Google any more

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There is still a lot of confusion about Google Page rank, the little green bar that appears on the top of your browser if you have it enabled. At one time it was a major part of the Google Algorithm, whilst it still has a role now, it's less significant than it was back in Google's earliest days. This article discusses the topic. Discount Domains is a leading UK ICANN registrar, which also offers Search Marketing services.

Tell me about Page Rank

Page rage is a measure of the number and strength of sites that link to you. It's measured on a scale of 0 to 10. With 10 being the highest. There are only a limited number of sites with a score of 10, and progressively more as the number drops, Adobe.com has a 9/10 for example. It gives you an idea of the link popularity a site enjoys but can be misleading. A site with 500,000 plus backlinks such as our site www.articlealley.com has a PR of 4/10, whilst a blog with just one or two links from very high PR sites can have a PR of 5/10 or higher.

This is because Page rank passes using an equation which is basically 85% of the score of the page the link is on divided by the number of links. So a high PR page with a single link on would pass over 85% to the site it links to.

The average of all sites on the internet is 1, so as the web grows your site will gradually find it harder to retain the same PR score.

What has Page rank got to do with rankings

This is where it gets confusing, at one time PR was a direct component of the Search Engine Results Placement or SERPS, now its just an indicator of the strength of the sites that link to you.

So in short not a lot!

What is important in Search Results now in 2013 is significantly different from what was the case back in 2003. The factors that are important now are:-

• The text on your page
• Your Title meta tag
• The text within the links that point to that page, known as Anchor text
• The user metrics of a page, Time on page, bounce rate
• Is the page unique, and not copied or used elsewhere on the internet
• Do you have good Social metrics such as Google +1 and facebook likes
• The age of your domain name and each page

Plus link related indicators

• The number of links added over time
• The absolute number of referring urls, different domain names that point to your domain name
• How quality of the sites linking to you.

Plus a few hundred other minor factors which change over time.

 

How to get better rankings for my website if its not about Page Rank?

 Well the following should give you an idea of what to do.

• Concentrate on quality.
• Add quality content to your site regularly
• Seek out other quality sites and get them to link to you.
• If you have poor or weak pages on your website, delete them or rewrite them.
• Add socially engaging features to your site, such as images and facebook likes.

If you need help with any of the above areas then reach out to us, we have our own in-house SEO team who are very experienced with getting great rankings for our customer's websites

Adrian Lawrence is the author of this article and is one of the webmasters at Discount Domains. https://plus.google.com/u/0/106088322856862782725/posts

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