Some people possibly attribute an unwarranted amount of importance to Page Rank, deeming a high Page Rank to be one of the most important targets to strive toward in their online optimisation efforts. It is important to remember that Page Rank is only one of Google’s many metrics, and perhaps should not be weighted too heavily.
The Function of Page Rank
Essentially, Page Rank is designed to indicate a page’s importance, and it does so using the global link popularity of a page as a measure. In simpler terms, this means that Page Rank gives us an indication of how many pages are linking to a given page, and the quality of these pages. Based on this, Google determines how important the page in question is, by giving it a rank between 1 and 10, where 10 is the highest. The question is, what do search engines do with Page Rank? This can be answered in 4 different ways.
Crawling
Some people follow the theory that Google spiders crawl pages with higher Page Rank more often. Google uses Page Rank as a means of measuring a page’s importance, and when it comes to making decisions about which pages to crawl next, it chooses those that it deems to be the most important to crawl first. So in this sense, a higher Page Rank can be helpful in increasing the frequency of crawls.
Inclusion
Possibly one of the more important functions of Page Rank is its influence on indexing. Google has multiple indexes where it keeps its content. Its main index naturally consists of the pages it deems to be the most important, and its method of measuring a page’s importance is to look at its Page Rank. This also applies to issues concerning duplicate copy, where Google uses Page Rank, among other metrics, to determine which page is the most important, and therefore which to include its main index. The pages which Google deems as unimportant are ranked in secondary or supplemental indexes, which are not always shown in Google.
Freshness
Page Rank is usually a good indicator of the freshness of the content on a page. This is somewhat tied into the previous point about crawling. When making decisions regarding what it wants to crawl more frequently, Google often uses the freshness of a page as a measure. When the content on a page is updated on a regular basis, Google will crawl those pages more often to keep up with all the changes. This in turn will result in a higher Page Rank for the fresher pages.
Ranking
How much of a role Page Rank plays in determining a page’s Google ranking is up for debate. Some people think that if you get links from pages with high Page Ranks, not only will your own Page Rank increase, but your Google ranking will improve too. However, Google’s ranking algorithm is far more complex than this, and Page Rank is simply a potential metric. There does, however, appear to be a general trend where the pages appearing in the higher ranking positions in Google tend to have high Page Ranks too. But there are many examples of pages with lower Page Ranks ranking well in Google, and the correlation between Page Rank and Google ranking remains unclear.
When considering the importance of Page Rank, it is important to keep in mind that it is merely one of many metrics used by Google. And when it comes to search engine rankings, Page Rank plays a relatively minor role, if any, in a page’s position in the Search Engine Results Pages.
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The Importance of Page Rank
