PageRank and why its significance has been under estimated.

Larry Page and his colleague Sergei Brin revolutionised relevancy of search engine positioning when they introduced off-page analysis of webpages in their new search engine Google, in the late 1990s. Before Google arrived the search engines looked at on-page factors only, such as HTML coding, meta keywords, page title and the number of times the keyword appears on the page. The Google algorithm incorporates back links from other websites to evaluate the importance of a web page. Only the inner sanctum at Google know the full algorithm, although there is an extensive literature on the subject.

I would like to return to the arguments that PageRank has no value in search engine optimisation positioning. There are two arguments.

Firstly, webpages are not sorted in PageRank order. One would have to get into Google's Fort Knox to learn the full algorithm, which incorporates thousands of factors. Only then would we be able to predict positioning correctly. Let me say up front that of course I do not know the full Google algorithm. But even the most knowledgeable are not even close. Let us look at IBP. In this research, I looked at 'HTML codes' as the keyword to evaluate the IBP scoring system. True, the top three have high scores, but there are pages with scores in the 40s and even 30 that are doing well. The IBP scores are no better at sorting out the positioning than PageRank.

You will probably know that Google provides a toolbar, which includes a PageRank indicator and this appears as a green bar. If you do not have it, I would suggest that you search for it and download it. It is available for Firefox and Internet Explorer, although it is not available for several other web browsers.

By placing your cursor over the indicator Google tells us that "PageRank is Google's view of the importance of this page". These two websites are my own and both these pages have PageRanks of 4. You will see from the top website, that I am primarily a gynaecologist. My 2womenshealth website provides detailed information for my patients, and also for medical students. With more than 1.5 million visitors each year, this website is the most popular on the internet in its category. Doctors are trained to work with evidence-based, best practice and this has governed my approach to search engine optimisation.

The second argument put forward by others to explain why PageRank is of no real value in SEO, is that webpages with PR of 0 can be found at the top of search engine results pages for highly competitive keywords. In this example from Howie Schwartz, the web page in position 11 out of 36 million has a PageRank of zero.

You have probably realised that I am leading up to revealing G-Factor-1. But I would like to provide you with a couple of opportunities to see if you can preempt me.

"PageRank is Google's view of the importance of this page." So how can a page with a PageRank of 0 be in position in 11 for a keyword with 36 million competitor pages. A second clue: Google states that PageRank is Google's view of the importance of this page but what Google does not tell us is which page's PageRank Google is referring to. This is the web page in position 11 for the highly competitive keyword 'Credit repair', which has 36 million competitor webpages.

Let us now reveal G-Factor-1 for you. Google does not say that it is the PageRank of this page that matters.  So what page could they be referring to.  Let us peel away the filename and go back to the HomePage. This is the HomePage of this website and Google tells us that it has a PageRank of 5. It is the PageRank of 5 that is G-Factor-1 for this web page. It is not the PageRank of 0 for the page that gives the page it's important. Google is interested in the authority of the website, as indicated by the PageRank of the HomePage.

So why do Wikipedia pages tend to be at the top of the search engine positioning even if they have low PageRank? Wikipedia's HomePage has a PageRank of 8.