בלוג לשיווק באינטרנט, ייעוץ שיווקי, וורדפרס וחיים באינטרנט *

“We have been telling people for a long time that they shouldnt focus on PageRank so much; many site owners seem to think its the most important metric for them to track, which is simply not true. We removed it because we felt it was silly to tell people not to think about it, but then to show them the data, implying that they should look at it.”

-Anonymous Google employee

As soon as Google made search engines a ubiquitous phenomenon, web-surfers figured it out, from an objective viewpoint. Immediately the competition was on to get optimization on Google searches. Google defines page rank as such:

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’.

According to Google, however, getting mediocre SEO for your webpage won't necessarily guarantee you the strongest standing on search engines. And contrary to common advice, what you have on your website's header or your content, will not determine PageRank. All that really matters is a site's popularity, and this does not necessarily mean how many hits it gets, but how many other pages link to it; the higher the rank of the page which links to it, then the higher the first page.
Google updates their search ranking, roughly, three times a year. The following are the dates when it has last happened:
• 30 October 2009
• 28 May 2009
• 1 April 2009
• 31 December 2008
• 27 September 2008
• 29 April 2008
• 9 January 2008