SEO - Page Rank Explained in Simple language

Dear Learner,

Ranking on Google, driving quality traffic on most important pages on your site & tracking engagement are all very important Goals for businesses today. In my previous posts we have highlighted the importance of Content in driving your SEO efforts. We have also discussed the parameters for an SEO friendly content. While we continue in our pursue of creating quality and insightful content for our visitors on the website, its crucial to understand how Google actually evolved its ranking & rating systems of websites. There is a lot of ambiguity on this topic & will always remain for obvious reasons (Google is very secretive about its ranking algorithm) Lets get familiar with a few SEO concepts that may help you get by and formulate a thought process in your SEO efforts.

What is Page Rank?

Page Rank refers to a rating logic where Google judges you based on the quality & authority of links pointing to your page. This formed a primary basis for the Google Algorithm. However according to Google, PageRank is now not the only parameter, and as a marketer you do not want to focus ONLY on tracking your Page Rank score. In some updates Google completely ignores your page's Page Rank Score and views other parameters as quality signals. What are these parameters?

• Your website's Conversion Rate - When someone takes a commitment driven action on your website.
• Your Website's Bounce Rate - When someone rejects your website content by "Bouncing off" or leaving your page right after visiting it without viewing any more content.
• Your website's CTR (Click Through Rate) - In context of searches that happen on Google, how many times people clicked on your website when your web page was listed in the search results.

Google's Chief Engineer - Matt Cutts explains briefly the concept of Page Rank & other parameters of the Google eco-system in the below video. You should definitely check it out. This is an old video from 2012, though it clears up the concept of Page Rank

 

Is Page Rank Important for my business?

Some marketers believe Page Rank is dead, some feel it's still used by Google as a parameter to rank pages. We will never know until Google gives us a clear answer. In my opinion PageRank is a part of a much larger eco-system now which comprises of hundreds of upgrades per month Google makes on its algorithm.

How do i check my website Page Rank?

The most straight forward way to do this is to use online tools. These tools give indicative results, which means its not the actual Page Rank score that Google uses, its an estimated Page Rank score derived my the index of that tool, which calculates the score based on the quality of links pointing towards your website & links that you are pointing to send your users. I regularly use the Check Page Rank Tool to get an insight on my Page Rank Score.

Conclusion

Whether Page Rank is important or not, one thing doesn't change. You need to get links from websites with a high Domain Authority (DA). That is the topic of my next blog post. Do let me know what you think about Page Rank. Leave your opinions, experiences or doubts in the comments section. Stay tuned for the next post on Domain Authority & its impact on traffic.