|
Article:
Introducing PageRank - shattering the myth by: Dave Collins One of the most fascinating aspects of the web is its dynamism. We all know that it develops at an astonishing speed - yesterday's craze is today's old news, and bigger and better things seem to be springing up every few days. Some of them crumble quickly into dust, while others seem destined to tower above the rest. Naturally, search engines also follow this pattern. Some of the early search engine giants remain with us today, but many of them are gone - and every so often, a new champion seems to emerge. Recent years have seen the growth and development of a search engine that puts all others to shame. It might have once stood at the same level as its rivals, but there is no doubt that for now at least, Google rules the web. Many of the companies we work with see more traffic from Google than all the other search engines put together, and there are more than a few Search Engine Optimisation services who focus almost exclusively on this one engine. What is Google's secret? So why is Google so successful? The answer is simply that when a user goes searching on Google, they're likely to find what they're looking for, and more quickly than on any other search engine. Exactly how Google manages to do this is trickier to answer, as they tend to guard their secrets well. They don't want us to know too much about how they determine their search results, simply because they don't want anyone to be able to manipulate their own ranking. Of course, human nature dictates that many of us aren't satisfied with this. We desperately want to be able to affect the ranking of our sites, and some of us will go to great lengths to do so. We work hard to find the perfect keywords, tweak our meta tags and optimise the content of our site to what we hope is Google perfection. But recently, a new word has entered our vocabulary, and is surrounded by so much hype that very few people actually have a realistic understanding of what it is - or what it isn't. PageRank is where the attention is focused today, and many companies are determined to find a means of improving their magic number. 'I want to be an eight,' they say, as if PageRank was a dress size that they could grow into with the help of some heavy-duty calorie shots. Unfortunately, it's not quite as easy as that. So what exactly is PageRank? There's a surprisingly simple answer: it is Google's way of estimating how important a web page is. On a basic level, Google decides that if one page links to another, the second page must be considered important. If one page on one site has '15
|
