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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 re

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.
        palish 18y ago
        Yeah... But just because a design is also a scientific paper doesn't make it overcomplicated.
        ntoshev 18y ago
        Don't get your point... Mine was that the solutions to machine learning problems are inherently messy (at least this is the state of the art).
  - mcdowall 18y ago
    I remember reading this a few years ago. We had an SEO firm perform some site analysis for a previous site and have just taken onboard the main principles and tried to replicate them. I think thats a good assumption reading up on it in more detail, the relevance of the rank itself is a very small factor in the performance of the site and its keywords etc. I think we may have some relevant high worth links coming in that i wasnt previously aware of, our own link building campaign rarely acheived more than a PR5 or PR4 site so I will look into the backward links.
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

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.
        palish 18y ago
        Yeah... But just because a design is also a scientific paper doesn't make it overcomplicated.
        ntoshev 18y ago
        Don't get your point... Mine was that the solutions to machine learning problems are inherently messy (at least this is the state of the art).
- mcdowall 18y ago
  I remember reading this a few years ago. We had an SEO firm perform some site analysis for a previous site and have just taken onboard the main principles and tried to replicate them. I think thats a good assumption reading up on it in more detail, the relevance of the rank itself is a very small factor in the performance of the site and its keywords etc. I think we may have some relevant high worth links coming in that i wasnt previously aware of, our own link building campaign rarely acheived more than a PR5 or PR4 site so I will look into the backward links.

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