PageRank: Acting Brand New - The Good
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Google PageRank is one of the most important developments in the history of the web. It changed the way search was done due to its emphasis on "voting." Now the more pages there were on the Internet, the more useful PageRank became; it tapped into the power inherent in the network which was the web.
With a huge number of pages online, organizing the SERPs is a big and complicated problem. PageRank became the basic algorithm which sort of underpins how Google performs its activities of crawling and indexing pages on the web. The SERPs depend on a variety of factors, from keyword density to the page's PageRank value. PageRank keeps Google's SERPs on point so that the millions of searches performed on Google continue be relevant and targeted.
Note that a lot of things which affect the SERPs do not affect PageRank, according to this report on PageRank
Frequent content updates don't improve PageRank automatically. Content is not part of the PR calculation.
High PageRank doesn't mean high search ranking.
DMOZ and Yahoo! Listings don't improve PageRank automatically.
.edu and .gov-sites don't improve PageRank automatically.
According to Google itself, "Google tries to find pages that are both reputable and relevant. If two pages appear to have roughly the same amount of information matching a given query, we'll usually try to pick the page that more trusted websites have chosen to link to. Still, we'll often elevate a page with fewer links or lower PageRank if other signals suggest that the page is more relevant. For example, a web page dedicated entirely to the civil war is often more useful than an article that mentions the civil war in passing, even if the article is part of a reputable site such as Time.com."
PageRank can also provide a guide of sorts to how a site's link building efforts are going. A high PageRank does not guarantee high rankings in the SERPs, but it does indicate that Google (in some vague, nebulous way unknown to all of us) has a high opinion of the back links the web site is generating.
This is where the trouble starts. You see, nobody can consistently guarantee to be on top for a particular keyword. Therefore, online firms started placing heavy stock in the value of their PageRank and began commercializing their web sites accordingly.
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