7 ms·

Ask HN: How Trustworthy is Google PageRank?

10 points by mcdowall 18y ago

Hi guys, Wondering if anyone can give me some feedback on their experiences with SEO and their site PageRank, we have been feverishly working on optimizing our commerce site : http://www.off2.com for the past few months and went live in the UK earlier this week. Weve been crawled by Google yesterday (i think!) and returned a Pagerank of 7. We previously had managed to get a PR4 with our static holding page through inbound links, optimization etc. Obviously we are very happy about a PR7 but I really want to know whether others have found that PR can sometimes be incorrect and adjusted by Google. I've checked over our inbound links to find some .edu sites which of course carry a lot of weight with their PR8's. Would love to hear the thoughts on any reversals or sudden changes others have seen.

pierrefar 18y ago
There are two PR calculations: the internal one and the publicly visible one you see on the toolbar. Google uses the internal PR value as one factor (out of reportedly hundreds) in determining the rank of a page in the search results. The publicly visible one is, for all intents and purposes, an entertainment channel like, for example, Comedy Central. It is never an accurate reflection of the current PR value Google uses internally. So what to do? Use the Webmaster Tools and authenticate your site. The Webmaster Tools give you a ton of data about how Google sees your site which is a lot more valuable from a little green progress bar.
- palish 18y ago
  Pagerank (edit: the "ranking algo") is calculated from hundreds of factors? Wow. That seems overcomplicated. It's hard to imagine that the best way to rank a page is to consider hundreds of influences.
  - pierrefar 18y ago
    No, that's not what I said. PageRank is one factor out of hundreds that determine the rank of a hit in the search results. PR is, very basically, a network analysis algorithm. A simple way of thinking about it is the random walk analogy: Imagine randomly browsing pages on the web by clicking on links, what's the probability of you landing on the page in question? The higher the chance of you randomly finding the page the higher its PR. But again, this is a very very simplistic view and the actual algorithm is of course very very secret. The idea isn't though, and you can read the original paper by Brin and Page at http://cli.gs/qVDNYm http://cli.gs/qVDNYm .
    - palish 18y ago
      PageRank is one factor out of hundreds that determine the rank of a hit in the search results. I'm referring to the algorithm for calculating the rank of a hit in the search results. If there are hundreds of influences, then it seems overcomplicated.
      - pierrefar 18y ago
        I'm referring to the algorithm for calculating the rank of a hit in the search results. That's not PageRank but the ranking algo. If there are hundreds of influences, then it seems overcomplicated. Well it needs to be a general algo that works with all types of content, all fields of knowledge, work around all known types of spam, in all languages, while working on HTML quality. Complicated? No, necessary.
        palish 18y ago
        That's not PageRank but the ranking algo. That's what I'm referring to! Hehe. I feel insane. Am I really failing at communicating? Let me try again: If the ranking algo considers hundreds of influences, then it is an overcomplicated mess!
        ntoshev 18y ago
        Actual ranking at the time of your search does not involve too much computation, because a lot has been precomputed and stored in those Google indexes. In theory, you can view every search as a function of your query and all the web documents out there. This function is partially evaluated for a fixed universe of documents and super optimized. Evaluating hundreds of parameters is common sense for machine learning tasks. If you look at the papers explaining how the top Netflix prize competitors achieve their score, this is again what they do: they run literally hundreds of algorithms over the dataset and then blend the results. And this is for a domain where their data is only (user, movie, rating, date) quadriplets.
        18y ago
- mcdowall 18y ago
  Thanks for the info, I was somewhat sceptical we had just jumped from PR4-7 overnight, I have seen a large number of new inbound links but seeing as we only migrated the site over onto the new servers and propagated the URL last week we still have loads more work to get done on it. Our keyword market in travel is as anyone would expect extremely competitive so hopefully SEO over time will prove to be a good investment of our time and effort, we were just rather shocked this morning at the new crawled Pagerank!
  - pierrefar 18y ago
    Well SEO on its own is not that useful. SEO to drive conversion is very very useful. To generalize, what's the final objective of doing SEO? Common answers are "get more buyers", "get more subscribers", "get people do download X", etc. To give you an example: I have a PR5 page that ranks in the top 10 for a 50m results query. The page has links from really (really) awesome sites (think multinational companies). Traffic from this query? Minimal. Why? It's not a commonly used keyword and certainly doesn't drive that many subscribers to the site.
    - mcdowall 18y ago
      Exactly, were aware of the relevance of keywords and the optimization of our deep level pages with more detailed keywords. We have started a review this week of our internal link structure and the use of more specific travel terms, ie 'holidays in tunisia' or 'package holidays in tunisia' for our deeper destination pages. Hopefully the relevancy of these search terms coupled with a well performing site should yield better results than we could ever anticipate for 'travel' or 'holidays' etc!! Cheers for the input
profgubler 18y ago
Forget about your page rank. It won't get you anywhere. It helps you know where you are at, but what matters most is search traffic. You want to make sure that continues to climb. A high PR helps, but focusing on it won't help. Focus on building links with good anchor text, that match the keywords you are focusing on. And if you do have a an actual PR 7 in Google that is great. It means you have a lot of link authority. Use it by targeting certain key pages on your site for the keywords that will drive traffic.
puzzle-out 18y ago
If any of your team went to university in the uk, get the company featured on their news page - they all want to push their enterprise credentials - with a link, thats a free way of getting good google juice.
- mcdowall 18y ago
  We currently lease offices out of our local university (excellent subsidised rates!) so I am already over this, I've sent out a press release relevant to the local market and the university. We should get some links on their innovation centre website hopefully - its a .ac.uk tld so carries some weight with google and other engines.