Common Google Pagerank Myths Debunked

Does your website have a high pagerank? And how much does this matter? Many website owners have some misconceptions concerning this issue. Google uses a particular algorithm to rank various web pages according to their importance. Website owners strive to have a higher pagerank to ultimately obtain more hits to their sites. Read on to learn about interesting myths concerning Google pagerank. 1. The higher your pagerank, the better your overall rankings. • This would be the case if pagerank was the only contributing factor to overall rankings for a website, but a higher pagerank alone does not necessarily result in a higher ranking in Google’s searh results. Google uses a number of factors to determine overall rankings for a page, and pagerank is only one of them. For a page to rank high in Google, many other other factors need to be considered. It is true, though, that you should still be concerned about having a higher pagerank, since this is one of the factors in determining overall rankings. 2. If you have more backlinks to your site, you will have a higher pagerank. • This is another misconception. You may have numerous links to your site, but if the links come from pages that are not indexed by Google, they will not be recognized and will not contribute to a higher pagerank. Your focus should be on getting links for high quality, relevant sites, as quality is more important than quantity.

3. To retain your pagerank, use no outbound links. • Here is yet another misconception. You may feel that with no outbound links on your site, visitors will stay on your page, helping to create a higher pagerank for you. But this can actually backfire. Outbound links will work towards making your site more interesting and will also contribute towards credibility. When visitors to your site see how interesting it is through your content and the content that comes through outbound links, they will visit your site more often. If you are really concerned about losing visitors, all you need to do is have your links pop up, allowing your site to remain open in another browser window. The important thing is to make sure any outbound links are to sites that relate to the topic of your webpage, and are of interest to your visitors. 4. It is not very difficult to reach the higher numbers on the Google toolbar. • Google has a toolbar that consists of numbers from zero to ten. A zero means that the page does not have any ranking yet. A ten is the best ranking that a page can receive. Do not be fooled into thinking that progression to the higher numbers is a simple matter. This is not the case at all. It gets increasingly difficult to reach the next level on the toolbar. As a result, you will not find ratings of ten as often as you will see the lower numbers appear. In order to have a ten by Google’s standards, you would probably need to satisfy just about every one of Google’s requirements. Google pagerank does not need to be confusing. Having a better understanding of the myths that are circulating will help you to have a better understanding of pagerank itself, and help you decide what SEO strategies you should concentrate your efforts on.