What Is PageRank Anyway?

Last week I put up a self-congratulatory post about my new Google PageRank. However, anyone new to SEO might not even know what I was talking about. And unfortunately, experienced SEO “experts” often know even less than beginners. So here’s a quick summary.

PageRank is one of the factors Google uses to determine how “important” a page is. This is key, since it needs a way to determine which results come up higher than others. For anyone in business on the web, this can translate directly into dollars, euros or shekels. For anyone else, it helps determine how much attention you get. Either way, it’s a big deal.

In essence, it’s a system of voting. When page A on the internet links to page B, it’s considered to have “voted” for it. So the page that gets the most votes wins, right? Well, not necessarily – for not all votes are created equal. A “vote” from a huge, important site is given much more weight than a vote from your grandmother’s blog. 

And what determines a huge, important site? It has more votes (links) to it, and/or those links themselves have more importance. But how are those links determined to be “important”? Start this paragraph over, and repeat endlessly.

Yes, it’s a very big, very complicated loop. Your PageRank is determined by the PageRank of the sites that link to yours, and theirs is determined by the PageRank of sites that link to them, and on and on, billions of times over.

But it gets even more complicated. Each of us only has a limited amount of PageRank to confer to others by way of links. If I link to you, my reservoir of outgoing PageRank is diminished by a small amount. If I link to 100 pages, each link is worth less than if I link to ten.

Now take it a step further down the rabbit hole. If the act of linking to you diminishes the power of the link I give you, how much is my link worth – its value before it existed, or after? And how can Google determine anyone’s PageRank until they’ve calculated everyone else’s PageRank? And how can they calculate those, until they’ve calculated all the others?

The answer is actually pretty mundane: Google just throws in a little “damping factor” and runs the calculations over and over until the difference in numbers gets so small as to be insignificant. Voila.

If you can stand some math, this is a fine explanation of the calculations involved, and this is a still-complex but slightly less math-oriented approach, which links to a very nice calculator you can use to estimate the effects of internal and external links on your own site.

Google PageRank Update

As of today, Google has updated its toolbar PageRank. That clicking sound you hear? It’s all the SEOs scrambling to check their sites, and the angry blogging from people who didn’t get what they thought they deserved.

After three months in existence, we’ve debuted with a PR 4. I’ve done little to no SEO on this site, no link-building, and wrote about what I knew (or at least had an opinion about).

Not bad at all. Cheers, big G.

Goodbye Ads

The Noisy Channel by Daniel Tunkelang is probably the most intelligent, thoughtful blog I know of on the subjects of blogging, the interwebs and related matters. As such, and with the sincere desire that you visit his site now, and with apologies to Daniel in advance, I will quote his latest post in full to explain a decision I made this weekend:

The Internet Is About Freedom

March 22nd, 2009 

I was in a bit of shock when I saw that the top story on Techmeme was a post on TechCrunch entitled. “Why Advertising Is Failing On The Internet“. After all, TechCrunch is an ad-supported site–something I admittedly had to confirm using a browser without an ad blocker.

But my confusion subsided when I realize that the TechCrunch post was actually a guest post by Eric Clemons, Professor of Operations and Information Management at The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania.

Here’s the outline:

1. There Must Be Something Other Than Advertising

2. Advertising will fail

3. Advertising will fail for three reasons:

• Consumers do not trust advertising.
• Consumers do not want to view advertising.
• Consumers do not need advertising.

4. Alternative models for monetization are available:

• Selling content and information.
• Selling experience and participation in a virtual community.
• Selling accessories for virtual communities.

In my case he’s preaching to the converted, and I don’t see why his arguments should be so controversial. But clearly they are in a world where the ad-supported model dominates to such an extent that most people don’t imagine any other business model is viable. I hope his post helps persuade a few skeptics.

Finally, I love his conclusion:

The internet is about freedom, and I suspect that a truly free population will not be held captive and forced to watch ads.  We always knew that freedom comes at a price; perhaps the price of internet freedom and the failure of ads will be paying a fair price for the content and the experience and the recommendations that we value.

This weekend I had already decided to remove the text ads from this site, and Daniel’s post this morning is a great example of serendipity, since he explains it all for me.

I would only add this: there’s nothing wrong with commerce or capitalism. I have a number of other sites specifically dedicated to selling things. But this site was intended to be informational and/or entertaining. And as such, there’s no reason for me to force ads down your throat. So I’ve decided to go all PBS on you.

But much like PBS, I will continue to shill for a connected service that actually contributes to this blog: my web host. So I’m leaving the little banner that promotes them. That seems reasonable, since it actually has something to do with this site, unlike the supposedly “relevant” text ads.

So there. Goodbye ads. You’ve annoyed me on other people’s sites, and you will no longer annoy other people on mine.