PageRank - Why Worrying About It Won’t Make Your Website Rank Higher?

PageRank (PR) is an algorithm – a mathematical formula that is proprietary to Google and is used to rank web pages. This rank is based upon a scale PR0 (worse case scenario) to PR10 (best case scenario).

The reason why PR has become such a heated issue amongst various website owners is because everyone wants their website to have improved rankings and increased visitors which will lead to more sales.

However, the sheer pursuit of ranking has led to nefarious means of getting those rankings. For example, businesses can ‘buy’ links from websites whose sole purpose is to provide you with outgoing links.

Incoming links are links that other webmasters have used to link to you. For example, another webmaster finds something of real interest. This webmaster links to your site. This is good for you because someone has found something of value and thus has linked to your site.

Now, let’s take outgoing links. Those are links that your website has because you have found something of value. Now let’s take this further. Let’s hypothetically propose that you have an outgoing link to a website that sells links. Google bans this site from its listings. As a result, anyone who had outgoing links to this site may be banned as well. Why? Because as the webmaster you can control whose links you link to, not who links to you.

Every webmaster that has bought links has the potential to lose a lot of business and money. Google actually has an answer page addressing this situation.

Read it here.

As a brief synopsis, Google is asking that if you know of anyone buying links, you can report them in order to improve their algorithm and the way it calculates PageRank.

Many businesses may not know this and may actually be languishing and wondering why their website traffic has decreased.

Google has implemented this policy because it realizes that some websites have artificially high PR rankings and has determined that these types of websites do not represent anything of importance and do not contribute to the Internet as a whole.

Google penalizes these types of websites because they are considered spam and decrease the value to their main revenue stream: advertisers.

Without advertisers creating their ads, Google wouldn’t be generating worthwhile searches and revenue.

The main lesson to take from this is don’t be overly concerned with PageRank. Continue to add quality content to your website and you will achieve adequate ratings without resorting to other means that may get your website banned.

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