Google May Start Calling PageRank Something Else

Google: It May Be Time for a New Term

Last year, Google quietly got rid of PageRank in Webmaster Tools. Google Webmaster Trends Analyst Susan Moskwa had said, “We’ve been telling people for a long time that they shouldn’t focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think it’s the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.”

A lot of people wondered why Google would keep PageRank in the Google Toolbar, where it still sits to this day. Search enthusiast Barry Schwartz of Rusty Brick speculated that Google would not want to remove it because PageRank is “too much of their branding.” After some words from Google’s Director of Research, Peter Norvig today, however, I’m not so sure that’s the case.

Note: Watch Norvig’s keynote address here (or view our liveblog of the event), and our exclusive interviw with him here:

Norvig said at SMX today that PageRank is still one thing that is “overhyped,” and that Google never felt that it was such a big factor. They have always looked at all available data, combining every available signal and tiring to figure out the best way to combine them.

Norvig also said that it may be time for some re-branding with regard to PageRank. There may be a different term in the pipeline. “There’s a technical formula that’s PageRank, which is the way of judging the links between pages, and that’s just one component of how we rank the pages and you get your final search results. There’s all these other things that come in, but they don’t have a catchy name. So some people apply PageRank to mean all the components that give you the final ranking, and that’s where we get confused. So probably we need some other term for that…We’ll get some marketing guys on it.”

I don’t know how seriously the company is considering this, as Norvig seems to simply be speaking off the cuff, but given the company’s repeated emphasis on a lack of emphasis on PageRank, it would not be surprising to see them change the name. However, the problem with that could be, that these same PR-obsessed webmasters would just become obsessed with the re-branded term.

WebProNews will be doing a live interview with Google’s Matt Cutts today at at live.webpronews.com. Perhaps he will offer his thoughts on the subject.

Is PageRank a good determination of the quality of a page?

To examine the worth of PageRank, we need to first look at its premise, and how accurate it is. Basically PageRank says:

1. If a page links to another page, it is casting a vote, which indicates that the other page is good.
2. If lots of pages link to a page, then it has more votes and its worth should be higher.

The basic implication here is: People only link to pages they think are good. It shouldn’t be hard to convince you that this premise is wrong. A few of the reasons people link to pages other than ones they think are good are:

1. Reciprocal links – “Link to me and I’ll link to you.”
2. Link Requirements – “Using our script requires you to put a link to our page.” or “We’ll give you an award solely because you link to our page.”
3. Friends and Family – “This is my friend Pete’s site.” or “My mum’s site is here, my dad’s site is here. My dog’s site is here.”
4. Free Page Add-ons – “This counter was provided by www.linktocountersite.com.”

Furthermore, anybody who has a top-ranking site will tell you that it tends to get links from new sites. This is not necessarily because it’s good (although they generally are). Assume a Webmaster is setting up a new site and they are looking for some outbound links. Nowadays, one of the first things they do is a Google search for similar sites. The links they end up with may not necessarily be the best sites, but merely the easiest ones to find. If PageRank influences rankings, and if they subsequently link to those pages – the new Webmaster will be adding to the inaccuracies in the judging of the quality of a page. The same is true when these new Webmasters use the Google Toolbar PageRank indicator to choose whom to link to.

To put this another way:
PageRank is determined by the links pointing to a page. But if PageRank itself has an influence on the number of links to a page, it is influencing (in a circular way) the quality of that page. The links are no longer based solely on human judgement. If a Webmaster picks their outbound links by searching on Google or by looking at the Google toolbar (even if this is only part of their judgement), then there is a corresponding increase in a page’s PageRank. This increase is not solely because it is a good page, but because its PageRank is already high.

Google’s First 1000 Results

Remember, PageRank alone cannot get you high rankings. We’ve mentioned before that PageRank is a multiplier; so if your score for all other factors is 0 and your PageRank is twenty billion, then you still score 0 (last in the results). This is not to say PageRank is worthless, but there is some confusion over when PageRank is useful and when it is not. This leads to many misinterpretations of its worth. The only way to clear up these misinterpretations is to point out when PageRank is not worthwhile.

If you perform any broad search on Google, it will appear as if you’ve found several thousand results. However, you can only view the first 1000 of them. Understanding why this is so, explains why you should always concentrate on “on the page” factors and anchor text first, and PageRank last.

Assume that you perform a search on Google and it returns 200,000 results. If we were to calculate every factor for each 200,000 pages – do you think it would really take just 0.34 seconds to search? The answer to speeding up the search is to get a subset of documents that are most likely to be related to the query.

This subset of documents needs to be larger than the number of search results. For example, let’s say that number is 2000. What the search engine does is query the whole database using 2 or 3 factors, finding the 2000 documents that rank highest for them. (Remember, there were 200,000 possible documents, and that’s the number that actually gets shown). Then the engine applies all the factors to those 2000 and ranks them accordingly. Because there’s a drop in the quality of the results (not the pages) at the bottom of this subset, the engine just shows the first 1000. PageRank is almost certainly not one of those factors.

Notice how before, we highlighted the word “related,” in creating the subset of 2000 pages. The search engine is looking for pages that are on-topic. If we included PageRank in that list we’d get a lot of high PageRank pages with topics that are only slightly related (because of the second factor), but that’s not what we want.

Why this is critical:
You must do enough “on the page” work and/or anchor text work to get into that subset of 2000 pages for your chosen key phrase, otherwise your high PageRank will be completely in vain. PageRank means nothing if you do not have enough ranking from other factors to make it into the first subset.

How accurate is the Google toolbar?

The Google toolbar is not very accurate in showing you the actual PageRank of a site, but it’s the only thing right now that can give you any idea. As long as you know the toolbar’s limitations, then at least you know what you are viewing. 

There are two limitations to the Google toolbar:

1.  The toolbar sometimes guesses. If you enter a page, which is not in its index, but where there is a page that is very close to it in Google’s index, then it will provide a guesstimate of the PageRank. This guesstimate is worthless for our purposes because it isn’t featured in any of the PageRank calculations. The only way to tell if the toolbar is a guesstimate is to type the URL into the Google search box and see if the page shows up in the SERPS. If it doesn’t, then the toolbar is guessing!
2.  The toolbar is just a representation of actual PageRank. Whilst PageRank is linear, Google has chosen to use a non-linear graph to portray it. So on the toolbar, to move from a PageRank of 2 to a PageRank of 3 takes less of an increase than to move from a PageRank of 3 to a PageRank of 4. A comparison table best illustrates this phenomenon. The actual figures are kept secret so we’ll just use any figures for demonstration purposes:

The PageRank shown in the Google directory (http://directory.google.com) suffers from the same problems. The PageRank shown in the directory is also on a different scale. There have been attempts to cross-reference these two scales but because they are non-linear, the results really do not tell you anything more than you already know.

 

Also of note is that a programmer managed to generate a tool to look up PageRank without using Internet Explorer. This tool has since been withdrawn, but whilst originally the numbers given by this software and Google’s toolbar matched – presently querying with such software sometimes produces different numbers than querying with the toolbar. This is Google’s right to protect their data, but is the strongest indication that:

Sometimes what you see on the Google toolbar may not be related to actual PageRank at all. (Google can and does, assign whatever toolbar PageRank value they want to assign to a page.)

What Google says about PageRank

What Google says

The best information about PageRank is, of course, straight from the horse’s mouth. We therefore felt it would be helpful to ask Google themselves about PageRank. Obviously, we realize Google won’t provide us with the exact specifics about PageRank or comment on the validity of what we’ve written However, we did want to ask them some general questions to provide us with an overview of how they see PageRank – now and in the future. We hope this this short interview will help debunk a few myths and answer some questions

Edy: Can you answer the age old question for us? Is PageRank named after the fact it is “page” based, or is it named after one of the creators?

Google: PageRank is named for Larry Page, Google co-founder and president, Products.

Edy: Does Google view PageRank as being a significant distinguishing feature from the other search engines?

Google: PageRank is a technology which contributes to the speed and relevance that differentiate Google from other search engines. In addition, Google employs 100 other algorithms to its ranking formula.

Edy: Does Google believe that PageRank significantly benefits the quality of its results pages and does it expect this to continue in the future?

Google: Because of the scalable approach PageRank uses to analyze links, it will continue to be a significant factor in Google’s search results.

Edy: Several people have been known to try to data mine the PageRank information given by the toolbar, how does Google feel about this?

Google: Mining PageRank data from the Google Toolbar is against Google’s terms of service.

Edy: How useful do you think the PageRank information is on the toolbar for a) normal users b) webmasters c) search engine optimization professionals?

Google: The PageRank information on the Google Toolbar is an estimate and is intended only for informational purposes. Many users have found it interesting and webmasters have been known to use it as a measure of their performance. However, because it is a rough estimate, the value to search engine optimization professionals is limited.

Edy: One method that people have been known to try to boost PageRank is by using link farms and guestbooks. How is Google likely to react to a site doing that?

Google: Google’s engineers are constantly working to update Google’s ranking algorithm to prevent manipulation of Google’s rankings.

what is PageRank? How is PageRank determined? How can you tell what a page’s PageRank is?

The original PageRank Explained document has existed for a long time. It was the first of its kind to present many of the ideas in a way that the average person can understand. You may be wondering why there is a need for a new version of this document. The reasoning is simple; everything in the original document was theoretical and subject to change. These changes have occurred through the authors’ further learning on how Google reacts and how we think about the subject. To this end you will note that an additional author and technical editor has been added to the paper. Mike Shishigin’s extensive mathematical ability enables us to explore some new areas of PageRank not mentioned before, as well as provide a section at the end that contains more advanced information. We hope to present PageRank in a way that gets across everything you could possibly need to know — without baffling you. However, if you want to know the extremely technical stuff, then we’ll give you that at the end.

We’re pleased that the principles in the original PageRank Explained document seem to have been accepted universally within the search engine optimization field. The one document that appears to criticise it, later explains why each of the points it makes are valid. We’re also pleased that since its publication, a vast amount of additional articles have been written about PageRank.

Despite all this, things have changed, and there are still a lot of misunderstandings regarding the importance (or unimportance) of PageRank. We’ve added new sections to address these, and new sections to address some new things. We’ve also tried to make the existing sections more understandable. This is a long document; it’s written so that a broad range of people can understand it. As it’s also used as a major reference in several university courses, we will do our best detail as much as possible. If you are “Joe Average,” then you can simply limit your concern to understanding the principles until you’re ready to dig deeper.

Finally, we thought it was time to dedicate some space to Google’s thoughts about PageRank. Obviously Google is not going to comment on exact ranking issues but, as it is their technology, what they say about it gives us lots of insight. We asked Barry Schnitt, spokesperson for Google, a few questions about various PageRank related topics and he was kind enough to give us some answers; you’ll find those answers later in the document.

What is PageRank?

PageRank is Google’s method of measuring a page’s “importance.” When all other factors such as Title tag and keywords are taken into account, Google uses PageRank to adjust results so that sites that are deemed more “important” will move up in the results page of a user’s search accordingly.

A basic overview of how Google ranks pages in their search engine results pages (SERPS) follows:

1) Find all pages matching the keywords of the search.

2) Rank accordingly using “on the page factors” such as keywords.

3) Calculate in the inbound anchor text.

4) Adjust the results by PageRank scores.

In reality, it’s slightly more complex and we’ll discuss this in more depth later, but for now the above description serves our purposes. It’s worth noting that PageRank is a multiplier and is not just simply added to the score. Thus, if your page had a PageRank of zero, it would rank at the very end of the SERPS.

How is PageRank determined?

The Google theory goes that if Page A links to Page B, then Page A is saying that Page B is an important page. PageRank also factors in the importance of the links pointing to a page. If a page has important links pointing to it, then its links to other pages also become important. The actual text of the link is irrelevant when discussing PageRank.

How can you tell what a page’s PageRank is?

To learn what a page’s PageRank is, you can download a toolbar for Internet Explorer from http://toolbar.google.com. Once installed, there will be a bar graph at the top of the browser showing a version of PageRank for the page you’re browsing. When you hold the mouse over the bar, you see a number from zero to ten. (If you don’t see the number, you may have an older version of the toolbar installed. You will need to completely uninstall it, reboot your computer and reinstall the latest version. Once this is done, you should be able to see the PageRank number.)

to be continued..