PageRank Superstition: 200+ Signals Are Not One Google Juice
Sorry Andy and the rest of the world: There is no hidden PageRank or Google juice that miraculously determines the ranking in Google's results. It's not 1998 anymore.
A few months ago Google disclosed to the New York Times that about 200+ so called "signals" determine your position in the search results of Google. It wasn't very surprising news to me or webmasters who practiced SEO themselves recently.
You could have a high PageRank in the toolbar and not rank well at all already more than a year ago, while you could outrank high PR websites with a few considerations put into practice. Also a high PageRank link would in many cases not push a site's ranking.
Like Phillip of Google Blogoscoped has aptly summarized it, signals, classifiers and topicality count.
So it's not that simple.
You can't reduce these 200+ signals into one term dubbing it Google juice like search was another Spaceballs movie.
So just please re-read the New York Times article from June. Do me the favor and quit that oversimplification reinforcing superstition.
Ranking is not about Google PageRank, toolbar Pagerank or the invisible and yet unnamed Google juice.
Times are more complex nowadays. There is a list of ranking factors you should look at, you even linked it Andy.
- It's not about the PageRank lottery.
- It's not about Google juice.
- It's not about the force some Jedi might master.
We live in a complex world, let's just face it. I didn't even mention Universal Search yet in this post.
PageRank is one signal among 200+ while other signals count even more, domain age and history for instance.
Tad you are missing the point of the article
It is not whether a document ranks for a particular term, but whether it is considered to be in the game at all.
PageRank has always been a combination of multiple factors.
So within you infinite SEO 2.0 wisdom, which of the 200 factors is responsible for this page not being in the index
http://www.google.com/search?q=http%3A%2F%2Fseo2.0.onreact.com%2Fdoes-netscapecom-delete-most-of-its-submissions&ie=utf-8&oe=utf-8&aq=t&rls=org.mozilla:en-GB:official&client=firefox-a
site:seo2.0.onreact.com does netscape
http://www.google.de/search?q=site%3Aseo2.0.onreact.com+does+netscape
Tad,
I totally agree with you.
As you are being so open and independant in your views, could you give some hints as to what are (the most important of) those 200+ signals?
Has somebody began to compile a public list of them?
regards,
David
Why even read Andy? He’s just got a mental disease against Google, and he’ll even do stupid search terms to “prove” pages aren’t indexed to fuel his obsession.
As demonstrated above.
Andy, I might miss the point but you make believe it’s not complex but a matter of Google juice aka internal PageRank. Did you just unsubscribe from my blog? Yesterday I had 492 subscribers, today 491.
I hope I don’t have to agree with everything to be read ;-)
david, I’m more subjective than independent. Check the SEOmoz ranking factors for a good start, Andy has linked them too, I will add the link:
http://www.seomoz.org/article/search-ranking-factors
Fiar: You certainly won’t make me start a feud with Andy, a (virtual) friend of mine. He’s a respected SEO expert but also prone to err it seems. This just proves that he is not a robot. You better stick with humor blogging. Btw. Google is a dangerously powerful entity so I advise you be very cautious the Internet giant.
Tad, to be honest I didn’t even click on “Google disclosed to the New York Times” link. I don’t care about how to get high page rank. I care about getting high keyword ranking.
I think we should start a new acronym for those who care too much about page rank. How about PRO? Page rank optimiser. I believe those who concerns themselves too much in how to get page rank rather than the real issues of SEO should be called PRO’s rather than SEOs.
david: The NYT article is about ranking in the results, so make sure not to miss it. Andy Beard’s article is about the underlying Google juice or hidden Google PageRank.
Basically I do not want to concentrate on what’s wrong but rather what is right so this post is more of an exception.
It’s crucial though not to limit the current Google algo to a “juice” like term. It’s a plethora of factors whicho have to be looked at as seperate not molded into one.
The most important ones nowadays, also from a SEO 2.0 perspective are probably:
Domain popularity (how many domains link to you)
Domain age (how long is your domain online, the longer the better)
Link freshness
Content freshness
Social media saturation.
Search results= (200 signals) x (0.X)
X= PR
Why not?…
Tad,
Apologises I misunderstood the post. I read the referred article. It shows one thing interesting is that google is starting to tailor results to which user is doing the search (by use of their historical preferences). This means an stronger emphasis on site stickiness.
Tad
I hope this is the reason why I am getting some traffic to my new blog which has a PR of 0.I might be doing well on the other factors.
david: No need to apologise. It’s a difficult subject matter even for specialists so it’s easy to get things wrong as I also often have only limited time to explain.
Yeah Clement, PageRank can’t tell you much about traffic.
PageRank is not the major factor for the influence of your traffic flow. No, it is not. Websites with a higher ranking have in the most cases an high PR, but it could be that more websites the same or higher PR has as the number one ranking, but that is only on keywords with many competitors.
[...] overall algorithm while devaluing PagRank more and more. Nowadays ranking is based on more than 200 so called “signals” among [...]
hey, its not 200+, its infinate number of signals ;), any number of. its an algo. it determines what is “juicy” at a signal level and what not. and its learning all the time. an evolutionary algorithm.