PageRank And SEO

A lot of issues have been raised regarding the importance of PageRank to a websites performance. Many claim that it is a necessity and a crucial indicator of whether SEO techniques are working or not. However, there are others who insist that PageRank is unnecessary and that it can be ignored all together. But what exactly is PageRank? And just how important is it in the SEO industry?

According to Wikipedia, PageRank is a link analysis algorithm, named after Larry Page and used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set. The algorithm may be applied to any collection of entities with reciprocal quotations and references.

In other words, PageRank is simply the program used by Google to analyze a website's ranking. It does not produce the list itself but rather aids in the compilation of the list. It does it by studying the sites relevance and importance in relation to other sites with similar content. By the use of a mathematical formula devised by Larry Page, it can identify which site is most important and most likely to provide the information needed by users.

For years, SEO's have long sought to improve their websites rankings through their knowledge of PageRank's basic program. Although there are many ways to do so, problems arose when some SEO's employed black hat methods to influence rankings. One of the most common is link farming, which Google had banned in their guidelines. Although Google has constantly said that PageRank is not the only search metric they use, SEO's still base many of their techniques on PageRank alone. This is turn has resulted to an increase in the incidences of results pages of search engines displaying sites that do not contain relevant material.

After continuous efforts of Google and legitimate SEO's to clean up websites with erring content, the PageRank metric was finally removed from the Google Webmaster Tool, based on an October 14, 2009 statement by Google employee Susan Moskwa. She points out that the company has long been telling webmasters that PageRank is not the only metric that they should be monitoring and manipulating to their advantage.