Myths exposed. High PageRank does not guarantee High Google Rankings!

Last week, The Age Newspaper wrote a long "doomsayer" article about a recent change to Google's (ranking) Algorithm.

Here's a snippet...

"Swarms of bloggers and webmasters of major sites like Washingtonpost.com, Forbes.com, Engadget.com and SFGate.com noticed a downgrading in their PageRank, Google's measure of a web page's value.

A site's PageRank impacts not only its ranking in Google search results but also the price it can charge advertisers. A drop in ranking can have serious financial consequences, especially for smaller operators."

Certainly a drop in your Google ranking position can have a dramatic impact on your website's revenues, I've experienced it on several occasions myself over the years.

But lets get one thing perfectly clear. PageRank has very little to do with rankings!

Don't believe me?

OK, here's an example to illustrate my point.

The key phrase "search engine optimisation" is one of the world's most fought after search terms. SEO companies work very hard to have their website rank as high as possible for that key phrase because it gives them huge marketing leverage over their competitors.

Turning our attention to Google Australia for a moment, let's have a look at the top 3 results for "search engine optimisation".





So you can see that web pages with lower 'PageRank' can rank higher!

Sometimes low PageRank pages rank highly because the home page of the site has a very high PageRank, so all pages within the site are "trusted" to be relevant. This is not the case above for WebProfits.

So how come they rank as high as they do.

The answer lies in the way they've structured their website (and that particular page). It's a fascinating insight into how differently Search Engine Optimisers can approach the same problem.

A quick look at their source code reveals strong keyword optimisation. No big deal, there are lots of pages that do that!

However, the secret to their success is the heavy use of the rel="nofollow" tag on all links OUT of the page (including navigation).

For those of you who don't know, the rel="nofollow" prevents the Google Bot following links on a web page, but humans can follow the links.

So, as far as Google is concerned, this page is a bucket with no holes. In other words, the page is not diluting itself thematically by linking out to other non-thematically relevant web pages.

WebProfits use their Blog to create optimised anchor text to link back to the SEO page, so it has highly thematic and relevant in-bound-links pointing to it.

They also use all other pages within the site to point to the SEO page - but none of these use rel="nofollow" tags. The SEO page is the 'prize'!

Of course a quick check of their backlinks at Google and Yahoo show's lots of links pointing to that page as well.

Lastly, it's interesting to note that the SEO page has a higher PageRank than the home page! You don't often see that.

I'd love your comments!