inter:digital strategies

It’s inevitable when dealing with search marketing clients that the question of PageRank will be raised. PageRank is one of the best known and most widely recognized site status metrics which is easily accessible to the lay site owner. It’s not, however, a particularly useful metric, and can, in fact, be highly misleading. How do you inform your clients of the truth about PageRank?

You can’t take the easy out. Just telling your client, authoritatively, that “PageRank is not a usable metric” will do nothing for you: they’re not convinced. You have to find a way to show them the fact that this abstract number attached to their website is not relevant to their search marketing strategy.

So what are the relevant points?

True PageRank is not Available

Matt Cutts has stated on his blog that:

I believe that I’ve said before that PageRank is computed continuously; there are machines that take inputs to the PageRank algorithm at Google and compute the resulting PageRanks. So at any given time, a url in Google’s system has up-to-date PageRank as a result of running the computation with the inputs to the algorithm. From time-to-time, that internal PageRank value is exported so that it’s visible to Google Toolbar users

Matt Cutts, More Info on PageRank

Further, in the same article, he’s stated that:

It’s more accurate to think of it as a floating-point number. Certainly our internal PageRank computations have many more degrees of resolution than the 0-10 values shown in the toolbar.

Although many would argue that anything Matt says must be taken with a grain of salt, this particular factoid has been reiterated enough that I’m convinced. PageRank is only made available to the public “from time-to-time.” When it is made available, it is made as a 0-10 integer which is relative to a far more complex floating-point number. If you track these updates, like at SEOCompany.ca, you’ll observe that they occur generally speaking in three month-ish intervals. They aren’t regular, and they aren’t frequent. So: Available PageRank numbers are historical and approximate.

PageRank is correlating all web pages in Google’s Index

Keep in mind: you’re competing against your competitors. Sites within your same field, selling the same products, offering the same services, etc. But PageRank is ranking all of the pages of all the websites which Google has indexed. A PageRank of 3 in one industry is not correlative to a PageRank of 3 in another. If you’re going to compare PageRank at all, you need to keep firmly in mind that your PageRank does not necessarily need to be a high number. Make comparisons exclusively within your industry if you want to get any meaning at all.

PageRank is not related to traffic

Currently, this site’s index page has a PageRank of 4. The blog main page had a PageRank of 5 before I switched to Wordpress and changed all the URLs, and is now unranked. The site is 8 months old. The site receives approximately 100 unique visitors a day. This is essentially unchanged from before the WordPress switch.

Another site of mine, Joe Dolson Accessible Web Design, currently has a home page PageRank of 3 - with it’s associated blog bearing a PR of 4. That site is 2 1/2 years old, and receives approximately 400 unique visitors per day.

You can draw your own conclusions.

Is PageRank irrelevant?

No, not entirely. PageRank conveys some very basic information about your site: has Google gotten around to indexing your page, have they found backlinks to it, etc. But it doesn’t and shouldn’t be interpreted as any kind of goal-oriented metric. It’s better to pursue valuable content, links, and traffic than to attempt to reverse-engineer your PageRank.

Keyword stuffing. Pick half a dozen key terms and litter them liberally around your website. What does this do for you? Mostly, it restricts the vocabulary of those who find your site.

Using high density keyword strategies and related strategies which optimize a website for just a few terms are kind of like assuming your audience has a 500 word vocabulary. Not really a wise assumption, given that the average native English speaker suppsedly uses between 1200 and 2000 words in everyday speech — and that this number is estimated to be 10 percent of their known vocabulary.

These statistics on vocabulary are an interesting question of their own, as an aside. It’s well worthwhile to question the veracity of that statistic. I suggest reading How many words? by Michael Quinion to get a sense for the true complexity of the question.

Regardless, by focusing your research on a narrower body of keywords all you’re doing is restricting the usable search vocabulary for visitors to your site. Is this an effective way to build traffic? Absolutely not. Even the long tail of keyword research is restrictive: but, rather than favoring a very small vocabulary it opens the doors to cover your topic as thoroughly as you can imagine.

Open your mind to all of the possibilities: consider that people’s vocabulary choices are based on their life experiences, not yours. No short list of keywords can possibly encompass the search terms used by your visitors: even when attempting to apply a list of thousands of terms across your site, you can safely gamble that a significant portion of your visitors may still arrive via terms you have not considered. All you can hope to do is make certain that the broadest scope of descriptive terms for your site are present and available to be indexed and searched.

And, of course, there is a corollary advantage to wide-ranging keyword research: you can expand your own vocabulary in the process!

One question it can be useful to ask yourself when beginning an SEO study is how, exactly, you would go about finding the product you’re trying to emphasize. It’s not enough to simply brainstorm synonyms or chain together descriptive terms: you need to think like an amateur.

The vast majority of customers for any web site are amateurs. Amateurs buying ski gear, amateurs buying computer equipment, amateurs looking for medical information. They aren’t likely to be professional researchers, either. So you should never assume that they actually know anything specific about your product.

After all, why would a beginning canoe enthusiast know that your particular brand of tortured plywood kayak is the best? For that matter, do they even know what "tortured plywood" is? Probably not. But they do know that they’re looking for a boat which is light, easy to portage, hard to overturn, and they may even know whether they’re going to be using it on whitewater or flat water.

Even assuming amateur customers, you’ve got to assume some knowledge at some point…

But the key point here is that you can’t just describe your product - also describe how it’s used and what advantages it has. Not only will this provide you with a wider variety of search phrases to be found for, but your potential customer will be able to learn more about your product sooner. It’s a win-win situation.

A good practice technique to use when thinking about product searching and product descriptions is to go shopping for something else. Specifically, some product you don’t sell and don’t know a lot about.

Searching for gifts is a great way to explore this whole avenue of thought. You’re looking for a product which you know little about and you can’t ask the nearest expert without giving away the secret - the perfect opportunity to try and discover what a good product description is in this industry.

Escaping the barrier of your own knowledge is such a challenge in writing product descriptions. When you are an expert in your product line it’s easy to find yourself focusing on the nitty-gritty details and ignoring the more widely known characteristics in your writing.

Providing your detailed specifics certainly doesn’t hurt you - but don’t write your description just for the product’s designer.