If you haven’t heard about Google’s PageRank, you are missing one of the most important aspects of having higher search results in my opinion. PageRank is basically a popularity contest for websites. The more links a page gets the higher the PageRank is for that particular page. However, it is slightly more complicated than that. Let’s say we have 2 pages. Page 1 is wikipedia.com, which has a really high PageRank. Page 2 is my page, sadly with a rather low PageRank. If Wikipedia was to link to your page, your PageRank would increase by a much greater margin than if my page linked to you. Also, it isn’t simply about the number of links either. If you had a ton of links from pages with low PageRanks, it still isn’t as good as 10 pages with really high PageRanks.
Often when discussing PageRank, people often refer to it with the metaphor of a liquid inside of a container. In the context of this metaphor, the container is your entire website, or even a web page. The liquid is this abstract value of relevant points. With each and every link on your website or webpage, you are basically saying, “Let some of the liquid flow here.” Of course, this means that the liquid that leaves your page to “flow” to other pages lowers the relevant points for your web page or web site.
But, how do I keep the PageRank juice on my page? Personally, I hate this idea, but if you must… Many big and strong sites like Wikipedia use the HTML element a attribute rel which is set to “nofollow” (Home). This will currently keep the search engines from following the link;therefore, you keep the juice inside your container. But why fight the juice? Why not the let liquid flow from page to page based on how you created it? You put those links on your page to help your users right? So, why is it that search engines shouldn’t let those pages also have some importance? Well, that is just my argument against it and I hope to always have a dofollow website.
As a final note, PageRank is a very important factor in determining where you show up in the search results. That being said, it is technically possible according to Google, that a page with better content and a lower PageRank might be placed higher in the search results than a page with terrible content and a very high PageRank. Of course, this just shows that links aren’t everything especially in areas where their are not many competitors. Always remember great content is the most rewarding factor.
I like the idea of page rank. That is as long as the ranks are given by users not my traffic as there are tons of sites that get lots of traffic just based on bogus hot links to their site.