Well, it is one of those things that, if you want to be able to say that you understand minimally what SEO is, you must have very clear.
Anyway I advance you that it is a very simple concept to understand and that will give you a broader view of how Google works today, something that is really very useful especially if you have an online business or a blog.
On the Internet you can find a lot of information about this concept, from the first patents of Larry Page and Sergey Brin, to the PageRank algorithm itself “deciphered” by many SEO scholars.
But what I am interested in conveying to you is a practical and useful vision that you can apply from now on in your niches or websites, and in case you are not a webmaster, at least learn something new and interesting that has practical application within your digital project.
Let’s get to it.
What is PageRank?
That a certain page or URL is in the first, fifth or tenth position for a certain keyword, search or query, is due to the sorting criteria that follows the Google algorithm.
The algorithm consists of the grouping of different formulas that analyze factors to assign that ranking, for example: the content of your website, the loading speed, usability, among many other SEO positioning factors.
But one of the most important, since the creation of the Google search engine is the famous PageRank.
Basically (and explained in a very elementary way for all audiences) PageRank is a mathematical formula that measures the value of a page in relation to the quantity and quality of the pages that link to it.
In other words, Google gives value to those URLs or pages that have incoming links from other URLs.
Imagine that each URL is a drop of water and that each URL that links to you is giving you a little bit of water so that your drop gets bigger and bigger. Another very used simile is that of votes, each link would be like a vote in favor of the linked page.
In this way we can visually imagine how PageRank influences the authority of a web page and a specific URL.
The fatter the drop of water, the more likely it is to appear on the first page of Google SERPS (search results).
This is the concept for dummies, since nobody knows today what is the formula of the algorithm and how it works exactly, what we SEOS know from experience is that not just any type of inbound link to our website will do.
But that’s what I’ll talk about next.
Any inbound link does not produce the same effect on our PageRank.
SEOs and webmasters enjoyed a golden age in which Google was very easily fooled by any type of link, the strategy in the past was based on quantity: the more links (of whatever type) you got to your page or to any of its internal URLs in particular higher PageRank and thus higher positioning.
This is now a thing of the past in SEO.
That added to the fact that we had a little bar that told us on a scale of 1 to 10 the official PageRank of each page, gave us at the time a drawing on backlinks and PageRank that so far we have not managed to match again.
Not even the most advanced SEO tools, since the most we can aspire to is to know the “internal” PageRank of our page (which is not little) but the “external” PageRank is only known by Google, since it is constantly modified by the links that our page receives.
The Spanish-speaking SEO sector has within its community both people who are strong advocates of “links or backlinks” as the basic and fundamental positioning factor, and other exponents who believe the opposite.
Although they recognize some relevance of links, they think that each time (and with each new Google update) they are losing strength in favor of other modern SEO factors, but they all agree on one thing: PageRank no longer works as it used to and we cannot measure it accurately.
Therefore we will summarize some fundamental aspects to take into account when evaluating the links pointing to our website:
Quality: that the website is reliable and real, no pages that frequently sell links to anyone (link farms).
Semantic relation: that the content that links to us is related to the destination URL of our website that is linking.
Naturalness: Do not play tricks on Google by creating patterns or forcing artificial link profiles (such as receiving too many of the same links with the same anchor text or anchor text).
Finally, do not forget that the internal links of your page transmit PageRank in exactly the same way as the external links you receive from other websites with the difference in your favor that you control the internal links, so put the focus and attention on them.
As we said before, today we can get to know the “internal PageRank” of our pages, through the original application of the PageRank formula that was published by Google many years ago, applying it through different SEO tools (although we will talk about these a little further down).
owever, the “global PageRank” is composed of internal PageRank + external PageRank.
The external PageRank as we mentioned before is much more complicated to calculate, because it depends in turn “in chain” of all the pages that link to you and in turn how many pages link to these… and (again) in turn how many link to these and so on in a really long loop, which is how Google behaves, when crawling the WWW (Internet) today.
To give you an idea: there is a pool of internal PageRank and a sea of external PageRank.
What is the purpose of measuring internal PageRank?
Within your own URL pool you will also find some drops that are fatter than others, that is, within any website there are specific internal pages that receive more internal links.
Many times we get obsessed with backlinks (inbound links), it’s a mistake I see a lot in newbies or marketing profiles that are not specialized in SEO.
They think that there is nothing wrong with the web and that the only thing they need to get off the ground is to get external links.
The reality is that there is still much to optimize on page SEO that can generate a faster impact and with minimal investment, proof of this is the optimization of internal PageRank, a strategy that you can start applying right now and that we will discuss below.
In short, measuring your internal PageRank helps you to see if your most important internal pages (either because they are the ones that produce the most sales or because they are the ones that for X reason you are most interested in positioning in Google) are receiving more strength or not.
This graph can be observed within the SEO tool DinoRANK, through its internal PageRank module.
In the case of the above image, let’s notice how the little ball on which I have placed the cursor, which represents a post called “how to increase your visits” will hardly be able to position well in Google under its keyword.
The reason?
Well, as you can see “the little ball” that represents the amount of PageRank that reaches this URL is small and in this case it is 2 levels deep in clicks from the home page.
If we wanted to have more chances to rank this content in Google we would have to take more internal links from other posts of my blog that have more PageRank (in turn represented by larger “balls”) and worry that in turn that ball was closer to the home (which is represented by the black ball).
