Why not forget about PageRank in 2019

Before talking about anything, let's talk about the elephant in the room.

The last official The public update of PageRank took place in December 2013. In October 2014, Google's John Mueller confirmed what we had long suspected – the Google PageRank toolbar was officially dead. The last nail in the coffin came two years later when Google removed PageRank Toolbar from its browser.

So, naturally, many people roll their eyes when they see "news" about PageRank in 2019. And many are content to let PageRank remain a remnant of the past.

But even if the PageRank toolbar is gone, Gary Illyes from Google confirmed in 2017 that Ranking* is still a ranking signal (although one of the hundreds that Google uses).

* (To avoid confusion, I'll use the term "PR Toolbar" to refer to the now non-existent public version and "PageRank" to refer to Google's behind-the-scenes statistics.)

We also have other evidence that Google uses and always updates the PageRank behind the scenes: in April 2018, they updated their PageRank patent and filed a continuation request.

Of course, the fact that Google has a patent does not mean that they use it. But there is enough evidence here to suggest PageRank always exists and it's always a metric that countseven though the general public can no longer view their score of 1 to 10 PR from the toolbar. PageRank is nowhere near being only measure that counts, but that does not mean that we should ignore it completely or pretend that it does not affect the rankings.

Which brings us to the subject under study: If we know that PageRank is still a ranking signal but we do not know what Google changes to their algorithm or how much has the PageRank in 2019, what can we do to remedy?

This is where SEOs usually fall into one of two camps.

1. You do not know about it and you focus exclusively on measures that you can measure accurately and that you think will improve your website (in which case this article will not be very useful).
2. You are using a new metric that is highly correlated with PageRank, which will help you make informed assumptions and optimize the ranking signal that we still know exists (in this case, read on!).

There is no one-to-one substitution for the available PR toolbar and no foolproof way to calculate the PageRank. I will not peddle snake oil and tell you that such a thing exists.

Instead, this article will give you (very brief) insight into PageRank's history, explain how it is (or have been) calculated, and then tell you about a recent study that shows the correlation between these alternative solutions. and these rankings. We'll finish with some basic tips that should help you improve your PageRank (in theory, at least).

Let us dive into a (short and sweet) PageRank story.

What is PageRank?

If you already knew SEO very well in recent years, you will probably recognize PR Toolbar. The PR toolbar took the most complex PageRank metric backstage and condensed it into a score of zero to 10, easy to understand: the higher your number, the better your page.

What is PageRank? TL version; DR is a way for Google to rank Web pages according to the importance determined by the number and quality of incoming links from one page.

So, suppose your page has a PageRank of 10/10 and includes links to five other pages. According to Google's original formula, 85% of the PageRank of your page would be divided between each of the pages you accessed. 8.5 / 5 = 1.7. Thus, each page would receive a PageRank of 1.7 / 10 of your page.

(This is a very simplified look at how PageRank was calculated.) If you are interested in the calculation, I advise you to How does PageRank really work? by Dixon Jones. It's a fascinating read.)

Suffice it to say that when SEOs talk about "link quality", "link authority" or "number of links" or use phrases such as "not all links are created equal" that's part of what we're talking about.

Of course, Google has changed a lot in terms of ranking pages over the years. It would be foolish to assume that PageRank has not experienced a similar evolution. Nevertheless, it is a safe bet that the fundamental concept and the underlying objectives of PageRank have remained relatively constant over the years.

This is based on the old PageRank patent, as far as I know. I would not be surprised if there are significant changes in the meantime. It's always a useful exercise, but I would not presume it's 1: 1, which is implemented at Google now.

– John (@JohnMu) October 26, 2018

Why PR Toolbar is dead

In theory, PageRank seems to be a good way to determine the pages searched by users and ensure that they display the best and safest pages that match their search criteria. And of course, Google still uses PageRank to some extent in its ranking algorithm.

But, as I mentioned earlier, by the end of 2013, the public tool was pushing daisies up. So what went wrong? The short answer is: SEO has gone too far.

With the advent of PR Toolbar, PageRank has been adopted as the classification signal to optimize for. Then a wave of link farms and link spam. Unscrupulous SEOs have tried to play with the system and artificially strengthen their PageRank score. The purchase of links to "high public relations" has become its own sector and agencies have started selling the service to companies around the world.

In response, Google ended black-hat SEO practices and began to discourage the PageRank rating. They also made fun of their ranking process. It took a short time for Google to remove the PageRank ranking data from Webmaster Tools (now the Google Search Console).

Google explained why many times:

"We've been telling people for a long time that they should not focus so much on PageRank; many site owners seem to think that this is the most important step to follow, which is simply wrong. We removed it because we thought it was stupid to tell people not to think about it, but to show them the data, which implies that they should examine it. :-), " said Susan Moskwa of Google.

In 2016, Toolbar PR had officially disappeared.

So, why are we talking about PageRank today if it has been lost sight of for three years? Because, in the absence of Toolbar PR, SEOs have developed many metrics based on the domain strength link that we can use for: approximate Ranking.*

* (Again, to be clear, none of these are an exact replica of PageRank, nor do they appeal to what Google is doing behind the scenes.But, like thousands of people have discovered, they are still useful indicators for your performance SEO and search areas to improve.)

Today, we have access to more third party replacement indicators than ever before, and others appear all the time. This raises the question: what is the best measure to use in the majority of SEO cases (ie, what is the new "gold standard?")

To find out, it has become common practice to measure these metrics against tangible SEO results – the SERP positions in particular. In this way, we can see which metric corresponds more closely to real-world results.

Domain InLink Rank Correlation Results

We want Domain InLink Rank to reflect the power of page ranking as accurately as possible so that SEOs can better understand the quality of their domains and pages. To test the validity of our metrics, we regularly conduct Domain InLink rank correlation studies.

Our last study took place from March 4 to 6, 2019. During this period, we compiled a list of 1,000,000 URLs taken from the top 30 positions in Google's SERPs for 33,500 queries. We then calculated the Domain InLink rank for each SERP.

We found that the correlation between the InLink ranking and the SERP ranking was extremely high: 0.128482487. I will not go into detail here, but you can consult the study if you are interested in our specific methodology.

In other words, the metric correlates quite strongly with Google's actual ranking.

How to improve PageRank

Although we can not see our PageRank score or measure it directly, you can follow a few best practice steps to preserve and increase your PageRank:

1. Build quality backlinks. Regularly run the return link analysis (probably using one of the tools mentioned above) and make sure that the flow of links flowing through your site comes from pages with high PageRank. In addition, some SEO professionals believe that some links may not pass at all in the PageRank – and that some may even pass negative PageRank (something close to the rank of spam). The best thing to do to avoid these problems is simply to keep your link profile clean.
2. Maintain a shallow site structure. You must keep your most important pages as close to your pages as possible with a high PageRank. On most websites, this will be your home page, but this may not be the case for sites with higher quality internal landing pages and more external links than pages on 'Home.
3. Follow best practices for links coming out of a page. Examine carefully the location of the links on a page. the links in your content are more valuable than the navigation links. And limit the number of links pointing from each of your pages to other internal and external pages to a reasonable number.
4. Tell users where links are leading. The use of an appropriate anchor text will help both users navigate your content and your SEO. Just keep it contextual and avoid keyword stuffing When done in an organic way, placing relevant keywords in the anchor text informs search engines of the content of your page.
5. Exploit unrelated mentions. As semantic search becomes smarter, unrelated statements are likely to gain in importance. I'm not saying yet that they are a ranking signal, but we have received hints that Google has begun to consider online brand mentions in its search algorithm.

Conclusion

When looking for new ways to improve your ranking, it is helpful to consider all the signals we know and take them into account in the decisions you make to improve your website experience, both for users only for search engines.

InLink Rank and other similar indicators are a good starting point for assessing the ranking potential of particular areas: sectoral studies have shown that these indicators are strongly correlated with the SERP rankings.

Today, links are still an essential part of SEO. If you understand this, you know that many optimizations based on the best practices of our industry have an impact on PageRank. We may not be able to measure it directly, but it is worth remembering that the PageRank formula is still important in 2019.

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The opinions expressed in this article are those of the invited author and not necessarily those of the search engine. The authors of the staff are listed here.

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