For those who follow the Google PageRank (PR) updates with earnest, many will find changes happening to the algorithm this time round. It happened on Thursday. PageRank updates have been happening about once every 3-4 months.
While PageRank is not something I’m not particularly fond of paying attention to because it has less effect on your rankings today, it does offer some clues as to what Google likes to see.
There seems to be two possibilities. It is either:
I noticed this from my websites. Some of my websites have lots of incoming links but they lost a little PR. Others that have fewer links gained in PR. There were also those which gained PR even with very few links but had links coming from relevant sites.
It’s highly probable that in time to come, one of these factors will happen. You’ll need to either:
- Get relevant links from similar themed sites
- Get links from sites where the page of the site is relevant to yours
It’s clear that PR can no longer be manipulated like it was a year and a half ago. Back then, people could simply buy a high PR link, say a PR 8 or 9, and get their site ranked in the top ten.
As the algorithms evolved, it has put more emphasis on quantity of inbound links to get to the top. It only makes sense because getting inbound links can either be a very expensive process of buying links or a time consuming process of researching sites yourself to get inbound links through reciprocal linking. This acts to discourage people from manipulating search engine results easily.
With the continual link spamming activities of webmasters, more criteria would have to be put in place to counter the effects of search engine result manipulation.
Having quality inbound links will still be important. More importantly though, will be highly relevant theme links.
So, if you are in business for the long-term and want search engine rankings that last, work on getting highly relevant links to your site rather than focusing on mere quantity from a hodgepodge of sites.
For more insight into the trends of the Google search engine, check out the Google patent which was noted in March of this year filed under the name “Information retrieval based on historical data” by Google engineers, Anurag Acharya, Matt Cutts, Dean Jeffrey, Paul Haahr, Monika Henzinger, Urs Hoelzle, Steve Lawrence, Karl Pfleger, Olcan Sercinoglu, and Simon Tong.
I’ll provide a deep analysis into the Google patent and how it affects future search engine rankings shortly.