Mohann Krish  
Any newbie in home business is keen to get a Page Rank (PR) for
his/her website or blog. Google gives PR based on the value of the
webpage. Does it promise anything? Does it make your webpage rank higher
in the search results? Do a search on Google for any keyword or key
phrase and chances are that a zero PR website may come on top of the
search results.
PR and Search Rank (SR) are two different things.
May be, the original intention was to show search results based on PR
only. But our genius SEO gurus will leave no stone unturned to
manipulate any process. So, Google bosses had to come up with different
and constantly changing algorithms to make any SEO manipulations
redundant. But SEO experts will not sleep so easily as to give up their
efforts. Astonishingly, we talk of transparency and what not in
governmental administration but when it comes to private enterprise,
everything is a secret!
It appears the originator of this
conundrum was Jon Kleinberg who fathered the so-called web-link analysis
at IBM. Later, Eugene Garfield of the University of Pennsylvania
developed 'citation analysis' in 1950s. In 1995, Larry Page and Sergey
Brin started work on the Google search engine which has now more than
78% share globally by mid-July 2008. PageRank takes its name after Larry
Page and is not patented by Google but by Stanford University.
According
to the definition given by Google, " PageRank relies on the uniquely
democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an
indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a
link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But,
Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page
receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by
pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to
make other pages "important"."
Without going into the detailed
mathematical theories like Markov chain, probability theory etc., PR is
directly proportional to a webpage's sum of the products of incoming
links' weightage and their respective PRs and inversely proportional to
the sum of the products of outgoing links' weightage and their
respective PRs. Now weightage reduces according to the number of outward
links! That is the whole rigmarole. If a webpage does not have outgoing
links (i.e., hyperlinks), the denominator would be zero! So, the PR
will be infinite because division by zero gives an infinite value. Such
redundancies are cleverly avoided in programming logic because the PR is
on a scale of 0 to 10 like the Richter scale and supposedly,
logarithmic in nature.
Likewise, even if the denominator is not
zero, but if the numerator is zero i.e., the webpage has all worthless
incoming links, the PR would be zero. Now I would place some outward
links having PR 6 or more on my webpage but there is no guarantee those
outward links would maintain that status for long! So, whether I like it
or not I have to choose Google, Yahoo or similar strong sites which can
be presumed to exist till the deluge. So also, my incoming links should
be strong - at least, some. But I cannot expect Google or Yahoo to
place a link on their pages to my webpage. So, our genius SEO gurus
would suggest stable sites, forums, social networking sites like
MySpace, Facebook etc. where I can leave comments or start discussions
without spamming to get some good incoming links via my signature.
All
this takes a great effort and time. Links should be built over a period
of time gradually. But whether all this effort is useful or not depends
on whether one gets traffic to one's webpage or not. Then one starts
depending upon Pay Per Click advertising and spends a fortune if not
wise enough to drop the cards at the right time. After this, one
concludes only organic traffic is the key to everything. So, enter SEO
gurus. Have a honeymoon for sometime with SEO independently or
otherwise. The best thing is to be found!
May 15th 2011 02:24