What the Hell is PageRank?
Kick around in the affiliate world long enough and you’ll hear lots of talk about PageRank. It’s a pretty simple idea but has gotten largely been mangled and obsessed over past the point of recognition or common sense.
When discussing PageRank, what we’re really talking about is Google, and how Google ranks pages in its search results. PageRank is a part of Google’s search algorithm that automatically determines how pages on similar subjects should be ranked in results. Keep in mind that there are other search engines than Google and while they may incorporate similar factors, when you talk about PageRank you’re really talking just about Google.
It’s easy for search engines to find and index content, and easy to return indexed content when users type in certain terms. Google finds many pages about “widgets” and when you search on “widgets”, bam, Google serves you up the 182,928 pages it’s indexed on the topic of widgets. That’s easy.
The hard part is for Google to determine which of those pages should be listed in the #1 search engine results pages (abbreviated as SERPs). What makes one page on widgets better than another one? How is “better” even defined? With the rise of affiliate marketing, how do you not only accurately rank all the worthwhile pages but also throw out spam pages that are designed solely to make money and are of no use to the average surfer?
The unique way that Google tackled the issue in the past was something called PageRank, which was basically a measure of how many sites linked to your site, and how popular those sites linking to you were. I’m simplifying here, for the sake of brevity, but that’s the basic gist of it. The measure of that popularity (a combination of total links to your site plus how popular the sites themselves were that linked to you) is called PageRank, which is displayed on a scale of 1-10, with 10 being the highest.
Think of it as a popularity game. If 1,000 websites linked to you, the odds are that your content is pretty damn good. The pages on your site would then get a boost in search results over the pages on another similarly-themed site that only had 3 websites linking to it. Your PageRank would be higher than the site with similar content, so your pages would get a boost over theirs in the search results.
Extending the idea a bit, all links to your site weren’t created equal. Let’s say you have 100 links to your site, but they’re all from other sites that themselves were very popular and had a high PageRank. Your pages would tend to be listed higher than a competing site that also had 100 links to their site, but with all the links coming from less popular sites with low PageRank.
To see the PageRank of your site, download the Google toolbar and configure the options so that PageRank is displayed. Visit a site and in your toolbar you’ll see the site’s PageRank, which is displayed as a green bar that runs horizontally. Hover your mouse over the bar and it’ll show the actual PageRank number in a pop-up box, on the 0-10 scale.
That’s the basic idea of PageRank. It was a good idea and worked well, but, like all things where money can be made, savvy affiliates and SEO firms started gaming the system. An ungodly amount of hours was expending trying to manipulate PageRank, to spread PageRank more effectively thoughout sites so that all pages got a boost, to not leak PageRank to other sites, and on and on and on. For good reason, as boosting your pages in results directly relates to making more money.
PageRank still exists, and it’s still a factor in the ranking of search results, but it’s not as important as it was in the past, as Google is working to incorporate other similar factors into its algorithms, such as TrustRank and other semantic considerations.
Stepping back a bit, the real reason I mention this is to try to prevent you from disappearing down the black hole of spending too much time obsessing over or trying to manipulate PageRank. People waste a ridiculous amount of time debating the pros and cons of things like PageRank, TrustRank, amd REF=NOFOLLOW OR REL=NOFOLLOW, when all they need to do is focus on creating good content.
I know a sound like a broken record, but all you have to do to make money in the affiliate world is focus on writing good, targeted content that people search for. That’s it. Predict their questions and answer them. Pick niches where people have lots of questions and retailers or advertisers are lined up, salivating at the chance to answer their questions. Do that, over and over and over, and you’ll make a boatload of money.
If you get down to the bare bones of PageRank and TrustRank and other factors, they’re really just getting at a very basic truth. They try to identity and reward good content that people are interested in and value enough to link to. That’s it. If lots of people link to something, it’s usually good, interesting, entertaining, whatever. Cool.
That makes your life very easy, as an affiliate. All you have to do is write good stuff, and let the rest work itself out. Sure, you can write crap and compensate for it by all sorts of sneaky stuff to manipulate search results and generate traffic, but that’s not a recipe for long term success, and often more work in the end than simply creating good content.
At a certain point, sure, there’s some value in being savvy to all the latest news about the Google algorithm, and what should be tweaked over here, what could be optimized over there, etc. But in the beginning you’re always better off to simply put your blinders on and concentrate on banging out good content, without worrying about all the extraneous junk that can lead to endless fiddling and wasting of your precious time.
What the Hell is PageRank? and related information can be found in Getting Started, SEO, Search Engines