We've all heard the term 'pagerank' - but for those that haven't (where have you been??) it is Google's own measurement of the importance of a particular webpage in it's index - a simple scoring between 0 (lowest) 10 (highest). People put a huge emphasis on pagerank (especially in the search marketing business), but at the moment, we are questionning it's true value. There are numerous variables that make a link a 'good' or 'strong' link, for example, some of the key attributes to deciphering a strong link are:

• How many outbound links are there on the page that you are being linked to?
  
• Where is the link placed?
• How old is the domain of the website your are being linked to?
• How many inbound links does the site that your linking into have?
• Is the link contextual?

All these different components give attribute to a links actual worth. A great tool which gives you an idea of a links strength is www.linkdiagnosis.com - really handy and it works pretty well. We recently ran a test to decipher exactly how influential pagerank was by setting up two blog sites and building two different types of links and optimising both the blogs for the same key term. Both hosted seperately and also on unique class C IP addresses - the test was to gauge over a period of time how effective certain links were.

The results....were interesting.

Blog A was what we called the 'premium' blog. We were going to surge PageRank 1-5 links (steadily over a 6 month period as not to trip the algorithm) to this blog, all with varied anchor text and we even deep linked to internal URL's to create a 'natural' looking process.

Blog B was what we called the 'economy' blog. This blog was made up of links with no PageRank, or a PageRank 0 - at this point we must mention that the criteria for the links in terms of outbound links on a page were all the same to keep the test as fair as possible.

Low and behold after 1 year of painful testing, we found that the 'economy' blog had triumphed claiming top spot over the 'premium' blog - why was this? The answer is simple - PageRank simply just isn't as effective as it used to be.

Long gone are the days where you would build a PageRank 6 link and shoot to the top of the SERP's for the selected anchor text. Google has well and truly wised up and they even thought about abolishing the fact you can see PageRank at all to try and ween SEO's and other search marketing corps from using it as a key decisive factor when ranking in the major search engines.

Ok, our test isn't 'bomb proof', there are going to be flaws - but it wasn't co-incidence, we ran a further 5 concurrent tests and the results were all the same. a 100% strike rate - coincidence or is PageRank really something we should be relying on?

Our opinion is, don't rely on it at all when looking at how authorative a link is - we think it is becoming a bit of a 'StageRank'!

Posted: 19/08/10 10:04