Why does no one talk about PageRank anymore?

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years.

Hello, welcome to episode 102 of SEO is not that hard, and today I'm going to be asking the question why does no one seem to talk about PageRank anymore? Now, if you're not familiar with PageRank, then this is, I think, google's first ever algorithm. It's kind of the basis of what made them such a better search engine in terms of the quote of their results compared to any other. That was around sort of in the late 90s. Now the full details of them are actually available online. Google did patent it back in 1998, but it is now out of patent protection and it's based on some algorithms that have been around for well over 100 years in terms of how to assign importance to various documents and things, and it's actually used in a whole bunch of places, as well as just with Google, for organizing search engine results. But I'll give you a very basic overview, for if you're not familiar Now, what PageRank does is it tries to ascertain the relative importance of each web page on the Internet compared to every other web page, of each web page on the internet compared to every other web page.

It bases this information on the number and quality of the inbound links to any web page. Now when I say quality, what I mean is the page rank of those links. Every link has its own page rank and that page rank depends upon the page rank of the page linking. This is a recursive algorithm, so basically, google has to sort of find all the links to all the pages on the web and then recursively work out which sites are linking to other sites and back to a set of seed sites. So he has a set of seed URLs that it considers to be the sort of high quality, authoritativeitative, powerful, important websites on the internet, and then they flow page rank out to the rest of the internet.

This used to be a lot easier to understand, um in the sort of the 2000s, because google had a um, a toolbar that you could put on your browser and this toolbar would tell you what the page rank of the page you were looking at was now. They gave a value between 0 and 10. So it was really. It wasn't the exact page rank of the page, but it was a value. You could tell within that scale which one that page sat within and it was logarithmic. So a page rank 1 wasn't a tenth of page rank 10. Every time you went from 1 to 2 to 3 to 4 to 5, it was a value increased by a factor of about 5. So page rank 10s were incredibly powerful the most powerful web pages on the internet in terms of the page rank those pages contained. So a link from them was incredibly powerful. And then a page rank zero was the least, so a link from them wasn't very powerful. But with this toolbar you could see as your site and your pages on your site progressed, got more and more links. You could see the page rank of your site rising and at the same time, when you were going out trying to find links, you would look for links off pages which had high page rank.

Now, obviously, google giving out all this information actually led to the whole link buying economy pre-Penguin days, because people could sell links based on the page rank of the page they were selling them from, and the higher the page rank of your page, the more you could sell the links from and that whole link economy built up from people trying to manipulate page rank. So this is when Google started to introduce the nofollow link attribute, where people could put links on sites and not pass any page rank, and eventually they abandoned the toolbar page rank. I think they realized that by giving the information out, they were just creating this whole link economy and made it easier for people to manipulate results, so that's why they just killed it. But it doesn't mean that page rank underneath doesn't still exist, because it does and it's still very important to the search rankings today, and ever since the toolbar page rank was removed, I've just seen the less and less people talking about page rank when it comes to links and page rank. As it comes to the importance of SEO, I think the whole concept is still out there, but it now uses a different terminology. So we have mainly things like DA, domain authority from AAH, which is just their attempt to try and provide a similar kind of metric to people so they can value different web pages, different websites when it comes to link building or just having that kind of metric that says, oh, we're a big site, because it used to be, if you got a PageRank 6 site or a PageRank 7 site, or was a, it was a marker, it was a.

People like to score themselves, don't they against others, and it was a way of scoring yourself against others with the number google gave you. When they took that away, that scoring system went. So people look for new systems, and a moz did one, majestic did one, a few others there's probably others that have done, um, similar ranking things. The difference being, though, obviously, with google, that was an actual metric from google that was important to them, that they were using. Now, with all these other metrics available, nowadays, that's just people guessing, that's just websites guessing, and there might be good guesses, but it's not an actual metric that counts in google. So da is not a thing in google, and neither is any of the others. They only use their own things. Now they clearly still use PageRank underneath.

Otherwise, links would have no effect on SEO, but the core of algorithm that is all about those links and how those links affect your ranking is PageRank. So if you don't have a good understanding of PageRank, then it's worth having a read because it will really help you understand how links and why links work. Now google probably totally have made changes to how they use page rank, but that's not to say it's not so important, but it probably works in slightly different ways than before. They've changed over the years. For example, at one point there was a thing called page rank sculpting which people realized. Obviously when you link from a page, the page rank that you flow out from any page is divided by the links on the page. So if you've got 20 links on the page, then the page rank you flow out will be divided by 20. So the more links you put on a page, the less powerful each link becomes effectively.

So when Google introduced the nofollow attribute at the time when they first did it, they said that will stop any page rank flowing out through. So people started to sculpt the page rank. So they would look and say, right, well, I don't want to send lots of page rank to my contact page or my login page and all these kind of pages. They would no follow links internally on their site so that they could sort of sculpt the flow of page rank through their site to the most important pages. So if you had to have, say, five or six links on every page that really weren't important but you needed them for your users, but they weren't important for page rank, then you would no follow them and then you would squeeze more page rank to the pages that you were trying to rank. But then, I think back in 2009 ish time google came around and said no, we've stopped the page rank sculpting thing, we've changed our algorithm. Uh, the note that doing that will not increase the page rank to, um, the other pages, that the other links that are not no followed. So essentially said right now, if you put a no follow link on, that will essentially that that that page rank will be lost now and they'll have changed it in multiple other ways as well.

But I would wholly, if you've not ever read the Patreon algorithm, do go and read it. It's interesting and there's a lot of complicated looking maths, especially if you look on the Wikipedia pages. But the fundamental principle, when explained, is quite simple and quite elegant and that's one of those things. That that's why, going back to 1998, when Google founded and first started, it was so revolutionary because it was so simple, that concept of links being votes for web pages and that some votes were more powerful than others. It wasn't just every link was equal that you could actually work out which links were more powerful than others. It wasn't just every link was equal that you could actually work out which links were more valuable based on which sites were most valuable on the internet, based on the backlinks that they had from other valuable sites. I know it's recursive, it can take a bit of getting your head around, but it was very, very simple and classic and led Google to still be where it is today, and every other search engine that is still alive today still works on a similar basis. They all work on a paid rank type basis, so it's an important thing to understand.

Um, and to me, I still don't know why people don't talk about it more, why we've all disappeared and just talk about da and authority in more abstract terms, when really there's an algorithm here that explains it all, and if we spent more time thinking about that, it might help everybody. Before I go, I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools, that Keywords People use, that you can book a free, no obligation, one-on-one video call with me, where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeopleusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up Once again. That's keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon.

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