Google's Matt Cutts Talks About Pagerank

PageRank is that magic number between 1 and 10 that Google assigns to every website. It is a number that is computed using the link structure of the World Wide Web and it measures the relative importance of all pages. It is an important number that partially allows Google to return the best results to a user's query.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) gurus spend much of their time trying to improve a site's PageRank because the larger this number the larger the traffic driven to the site via organic search results. Even though the algorithm for computing a page's PageRank was published by Google's founders in 1995, the algorithm has since been modified to scale up to the web's enormous size as possible and also to circumvent being exploited by SEO experts. These continuous changes to the algorithm are not published and SEO engineers often find themselves trying to understand how the algorithm works by monitoring Google's behavior.

It is widely believed that the larger a page's PageRank the higher it will appear on Google's homepage and the more traffic it will receive. As a result, many webmasters lose a lot of sleep over improving their site's PageRank. Since the value of PageRank depends on the number and quality of incoming links, webmasters often pay a premium to have a high PageRank site link to theirs. In addition, webmasters can monetize their site by selling links to others; if they manage to get their PageRank to a value larger than 5 then they can sell these links at a high cost. All these have created an entire economy around Google's magic number.

Matt Cutts is a Google engineer who maintains his own blog often talking about Google's competition, marketing strategy and technology. Occasionally, Matt talks about the calculation and significance of PageRank. Needless to say, many SEO gurus study his blog trying to read between the lines and figure out how PageRank is computed and used. Recently, Matt wrote to answer some frequently asked questions about PageRank. In this posting, he reveals that PageRank is not an integer between 1 and 10 but instead a floating point number in the same range allowing Google a high degree of precision. In addition, he tells us that the number actually exported and shown on Google's toolbar is in fact only an integer value. In addition, he points out that Google continuously calculates this number and only exports it to the toolbar once every a few months. People often notice that PageRank numbers are changing on the toolbar every 3 months and mistakenly assume that those are the only times that the numbers are actually computed.

Finally, I would like to point out that Matt specifically says that PageRank is considered by Google when a user performs a search. Matt says, "By the time you see newer PageRanks in the toolbar, those values have already been incorporated in how we score/rank our search results." Some people have questioned as to whether Google still uses PageRank in their search engine algorithm. They claim that it only exists to sidetrack SEO experts with malicious intent. Matt's sentence claims that Google still uses PageRank in ranking search results reinforcing the belief that it is still relevant; the actual importance of PageRank, however, is hard to establish and as Google has said in the past, the results presented to users are the product of a very complex algorithm with many parameters including PageRank.

My advice to webmasters is to have a link strategy and try to gain a healthy PageRank value. I would not recommend that people obsess over PageRank and instead focus on content. Good content will force other websites to link to yours helping you improve its PageRank. Be very careful of SEO companies that promise you many riches if you are willing to pay them a hefty sum of money to improve your site's PageRank. Increasing this one number by itself is not likely to have such a large effect. Original, fresh and keyword content is still the best way to achieving success online.