Having recently posted about PageRank I wanted to expand on it a little here, not the recent update but the confusion and myths often associated with PR. I had a few emails after the post, asking questions about PageRank most making over exaggerate claims and misleading assumptions on its impact in relation to their search engine rankings.

The truth is many Webmasters often obsess over the importance of PageRank in relation to their Page Rank. Note two words, "Page Rank" not PageRank (PR), two different things. PR is just one of the many factors that Google uses to determine a page's actual Page Rank on their search result page (SERP) for a given search query.

So why does everyone bang on about PageRank? More than likely because it's the most visual algorithm of Google complex Page Ranking system. It's free to download the PR Toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer but its open to misleading interpretations. It's also even easier to get pulled into an obsessive world of link building and SEO pitfalls. I once heard a SEO guru state PR is a way of making people look at one hand whilst the other hand does something else. I still think this is very true today.

This unhealthy obsession with PR is possibly being felt at Google HQ, as Google Chrome currently does not offer this visual PR tool and Matt Cutts as gone on record stating that he would like to remove the PageRank indicator altogether from the current Toolbar. So then does this mean PR is dying? Of course not, PR has just been given far too much focus in SEO community. My opinion is that Google shot themselves in the foot with PR helping to create an industry of link farms and PR advertising merchants they didn't want. Most of Google efforts and patents now seem to focus on eradicating this manufactured phenomenon.

It's important to remember that PR is just one of many algorithms Google uses to determine the relevancy of pages. There are many more publicly known algorithms known to us mere mortals such as Hilltop, TrustRank (used in PR) and Hypertext-Matching Analysis with it's many more algorithms.

To quote: The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine by the founders of Google Sergey Brin and Lawrence Page. A paper if you have read this far you should read in full here

"Google maintains much more information about web documents than typical search engines. Every hitlist includes position, font, and capitalization information. Additionally, we factor in hits from anchor text and the PageRank of the document. Combining all of this information into a rank is difficult. We designed our ranking function so that no particular factor can have too much influence."

Now I have that out of my system, to recap, PR is not the same as Page Rank, and PR is NOT the single most factor in Page Rank (two words). If I write the words PR I always mean PageRank I will explicitly say Page Rank when referring to how a page is ranked in the search engines. Think of it as ColdFusion, I actually mean the markup language CFML and not ColdFusion Server, does that make sense?

If you have not already heard of the two other algorithms I mentioned above Trust Rank and Hilltop, chances are you just Googled them, right? If not then you should. They are just as important as PR and one of them was actually invented because of a flaw found in PR and works along side it, but by no means the only factors in Page Rank (two words). If you cannot be bothered to Google them then here is summery

PageRank: The basic definition of PR is that PR determines the authority of a page in general.

Hilltop (patent in February 2003): determines the authority of page related to the search term used.

TrustRank: harder to explain in one sentence for me anyway, it's to do with links from a seeding page. It's not to be confused with Yahoo's Trust Rank so we are told Trust Rank Explained by Matt Cutts here

Conclusion

SEO is full of people that remind me of the Principles of Adaptive Behavior. Just because something changed for the better its attributive to just one factor or something you did different at one point in time. It's the blind leading the blind when it comes to SEO. I will never write or tell my clients I can get them top ranking results, if you do then you're lying to your customers. I can tell you what Google is looking for and its hard work not black magic, good content, updates and a site people want to visit. That's not what most clients wants to hear, and yes there are tricks you can use. I have done many of them myself. For example some years back .NET magazine asked me to get a site to the top of Google in six weeks and write about it. I did, not ethically and it did not say at the top for long. Something all webmasters should remember when saying links and PR is the most important factor in SEO, is not it's just one!