I noticed something interesting today. I was playing with some SEO tools to understand how Google ranks sites a bit better and decided to check how many inbound links Google thinks this site has. I fired up Google and tried:

link:http://www.u-g-h.com/

Google reported a grand total of 248 websites that link to my home page. Now, I don’t think of myself as being vain, but I remember back in the days when my PageRank was 5 that I had tens of thousands of inbound links. So I popped off to ask other search engines what inbound links they though I had:

http://siteexplorer.search.yahoo.com/search?p=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.u-g-h.com&bwm=i&bwmf=u&bwms=p&fr=FP-tab-web-t&fr2=seo-rd-se

Well, Yahoo thinks I have over 33,000 links spread over almost 8000 pages.

Now, I suspect this might have something to do with relevance. It’s possible to ask Google what websites it thinks are related to you:

related:http://www.u-g-h.com

gives a list of websites that Google thinks are related to this one. Which means Google has the ability to figure out what box to put your website in. My theory is that the drop in incoming links could come about from Google only caring about inbound links from related websites. So, if you had a website that lets you search for videographers for example, an inbound link from a website selling acne treatments might not count. I’m not saying this is a bad thing for the searching public as it increases the relevance of the searches. However it does mean that using Page Rank to gauge the value of a website is probably the wrong metric to use.

This theory could explain some things I considered strange on my website. For example, my Comment Email Responder page has a PageRank of 0, even though there are hundreds of bloggers out there who wax lyrical about the plugin. But, if Google thinks the page is about PHP development (which is what it really is), and all the bloggers talking about it don’t run blogs about PHP development (which I’m pretty sure most of them don’t), then Google wouldn’t count those links. What do you think? Does the theory hold water?

The bottom line is that I believe PageRank is really just an internal measure that Google uses to figure out relative relationships between pages in a certain theme and is useless for comparing one webpage to another. Would love to hear your feedback

For those unfamiliar with the term, PageRank is the heart of a trademarked algorithm that Google uses to power it’s search engine. It’s a link analysis algorithm that is based around gauging the “importance” of a web page by how many other web pages link to it. Not only does it take into account how many pages link to the page in question, but also, their own rank and the number and relevance of pages that link to them. A few years ago, Google made the decision to expose this Page Rank figure to webmasters and users around the web, probably to help them optimise their sites and understand their placing in their index. And this is what is the cause of the problem today.

See, a whole industry has been spawned around PR. If you search for the term in Google, you will find hundreds of websites and companies claiming to be Search Engine Optimisation experts who can help you increase your Page Rank. Not only this, but in the absence of any decent metrics for site comparison, Page Rank has become the cornerstone of all “paid blogging” efforts and people selling space on their website.

And this is a problem. In a pure sense, the PR of a website is no indication of the quality of a website. PR can be manipulated, PR can be bought and sold and website owners, particularly bloggers run the danger of forgetting that what really draws people to the website is the quality of the content there. PR is no measure of “value” that a website brings to the Internet, it’s simply Google’s internal metric which it uses to tailor it’s search results.

I especially find it interesting that people claim that Google is “censoring” the Internet, that it is being “anti-competitive” and that it’s ruining their websites. Page Rank is a comparative index and most of all, the index actually belongs to Google. Your PR may have changed, but does it mean you can no longer find your site when you search for it in Google? Has it actually changed the number of page hits your site gets? Does it make your content less relevant?

My advice to everyone out there is this: Stop worrying about your PR and focus on producing some real, genuine, valuable content. This is what brings people to your website and gets them to come back again. If Google decided to set everybody’s PR to 0, or to stop publishing it altogether (it’s certainly their prerogative to do this), what would this really mean to you, your business and the people who visit your website? Focus on your content, whatever Google does to Page Rank, the market will adjust.