Do not fall into the Page Rank Trap

Back in 1995, when the internet was little baby unaware of how it would change the face of our planet in a few more years, Larry Page of Stanford University developed a method to rank web pages, and named it “Page Rank” Larry Page then went o­n to form Google, the search engine that enabled the internet to happen.Google continues to use “Page Rank” as o­ne of the factors used to determine the rank of a web page in the search results. The google toolbar displays the page rank of the page the user is visiting. Varying from 0 to 10, the toolbar page rank is a measure of the importance of a webpage according to Google.

The way to increase the page rank of a page is to get more incoming links to that page. An incoming link from a related website would be much more valuable than a link from a non related website.

Webmasters often obsess over page rank like as if it is a real measure of their sites value. A whole industry of buying and selling text links and domains has sprung up that uses page rank to measure the value of a website. What people fail to understand is that page rank is o­nly o­ne of the many factors that Google uses to determine the rank in the search results. If the goal of the webmaster is o­nly to increase his pagerank, then sooner or later he is likely to loose sight of the real value he is providing to his site visitor, he may fall prey to buying text links from irrelevant sites, or exchanging links with low quality websites that have temporarily inflated their page rank.

The goal of a webmaster should be to increase the value to the site visitor by providing good content, tools, easy navigation etc Also to position their website url out there to get relevant traffic to their site. This is precisely what is the goal of the search engines also, to give the users the best quality sites that they are searching for. Page rank is o­nly an intermediate value that is not relevant to the visitor of your website. If you build your site for your site visitor, and not for the search engines, you will find that the search engine will sooner or later rank your site well because the goal of the search engine is to provide better value to the searcher. o­n the other hand, if you obsess with page rank, meta tags etc and build your site for the search engine rather than for your visitor, then you will not even realise when you may have crossed the fine line between search engine optimisation and over-optimisation resulting in some kind of penalty.