Google Page Rank Gets Better
In the recent days, many site owners and bloggers have noticed a reduction in their Google Page Rank and many guys have written about this including Robert Scoble (actually I only linked to his post because I liked his ideas about this).
As is pointed out by others, this reduction is a result of major changes in Google algorithm to calculate the Page Rank and many famous sites and blogs have been affected by this change. Checking some .NET sites and blogs, I noticed that Scott Guthrie has 6 Page Rank (rather than 7), Scott Hanselman has gone down to 5 from 7 and ASP Alliance has 4 or 6 Page Rank while it was 7 previously (you don't know how hard was that to find their previous Page Ranks even harder than updating this blog for a month or so!).
But I'm not going to talk about this reduction disaster (!) at all! It's been a long time that I wanted to write about my ideas about Google Page Rank (probably for almost 4-5 years) but I always thought that I'm wrong about this until today when I saw that finally web gurus reached to the point that I was at 4-5 years ago. In this while I always was thinking about Page Rank as a funny thing to laugh to it and pass the time (and also getting more dollars from Google Adsense!).
A few years ago, when I was studying Applied Mathematics in university, read an issue about Page Rank calculation algorithm from a technical point of view and learned many things about Page Rank (including the pros and cons of the original algorithm). At that time, I thought this algorithm has many holes and can't be trusted as a parameter to determine the importance of a website or even its popularity. Unfortunately none of our teachers were very familiar with web stuff to help me work more on this idea and this question mark was in my mind for a long time!
The actual reason that I got this thought was the easy ways to beat the algorithm and improve the Page Rank and also the direct effect of chains of sites and their rank on the resulting Page Rank. I tested that idea with a few sites and noticed that my anticipation is probably right. The main site that could help me find many secrets about Page Rank holes was Jeff Atwood's blog. Despite the importance and popularity of his blog for a long time, he always kept 5 Page Rank (Jeff commented that he had 6 Page Rank for a long time and it's now 5 but I had gotten 5 from the local Google Page Rank server due to the popularity of his site in this area) and this was really interesting for me. I had to write an article about his Page Rank if I didn't finish university last year!!
I can't discuss about all mathematical reasons that prove the big holes in original Page Rank algorithm here but trust on me that it couldn't reflect neither the importance nor the popularity of a site.
But Google started a process to change the algorithm and the way that it calculates the Page Rank last year and now they seem to be in the final points and it has found its shape. After going up to 6 Page Rank for my site and then moving down to 5 again after 2-3 months, first I thought there is a problem in my design so tried to fix a few problems in my blog template but it didn't have any effect. But beside this, I noticed that Page Rank of my single web pages is increasing and while my homepage has a 5 Page Rank many of my individual posts have same Page Rank or 4 Page Rank. As the result I saw that my site is going up in search results for special queries and more visitors are brought to the site from Google. This was obvious enough for me when I put my foot in the military office for the first day and there someone had found my blog in the first results for many .NET related queries and knew my name and that became a big trouble for me in the military office (because now they ask me to do anything because they think I know about it!).
It seems that the updated algorithm relies on single pages and assigns rank to them and reduces the effect of internal linking on other pages. Therefore if you don't have a very popular site with many incoming links but have a good blog post about a special topic (say C#, for example) then still you have the chance to be the first search result upper than many famous .NET communities. In fact, Page Rank is being assigned based on queries and this is interesting because can fill many of those holes in the original Google Page Rank algorithm.
However, I never considered Page Rank as an important parameter for any site and won't consider it after this as well. I never used Page Rank tools on my browsers to know how important is a site or a page because the importance of a page is in its content and how valuable can it be for someone and our web technology isn't powerful yet to calculate this.
[advertisement] Axosoft OnTime 2008 is four developer tools in one: bug tracking, project wiki, feature management, and help desk. It manages your development process so developers can focus on coding. Installed or Hosted – Free Single-user license -- Free 30-day team trial.
3 Comments : 10.25.07
Feedbacks
Jeff,
Actually I've been checking your site from the local server not all servers so it may be a result of this because your blog isn't very well-known in this part of the world and should have less PR here ;-) However, I'm pretty sure that I've seen it with 5 PR for some times during the recent years from this server.
And yep, that had to be "hole" not "whole". What was wrong with me to repeat this mistake 4-5 times?
Thank you for your comment and your notices :-)
really
#1
Jeff Atwood
10.26.2007 @ 11:50 PM