What are Pagerank, Authority when you talk about Google SEO

[Mohit Anand]

Google announced that it has changed the way the weight is assigned to the links within a page, thus the savvy SEO should change some paradigms that would be missed most, destroying authority allocation practices to link known as Pagerank Sculpting.

Here I raise two quite distinct concepts but now very confused, especially for those beginning their forays in the SEO.

The first is the Pagerank and the second is the Authority.

The Pagerank of a site is a numeric value ranging from 0 to 10 that Google assigns to a site according to the amount of incoming links it has. The Authority is a slightly more complex concept that helps to assign part of the pagerank importance. The pagerank and much has been said, the bar has attracted much attention, perhaps too much, but not the concept of authority.

The Authority of a site can not be measured with a single number so in reality there are several factors to be taken into account, the links are obviously one of them, but what link? Google gives more weight to links from a site if they are related to the content and / or the subject thereof. That is why inbound links to a website of cars made from a motorcycle has more value than links from blog types of birds in Australia.

The Authority is also based on site value, more qualitative than quantitative, other factors besides inbound links and quality of these, such as: age of the site, update frequency, centrality of content, content quality, originality, quality of outgoing links, number of outbound links, site structure (topics and sitemaps, etc.).

What all this is based? The guidelines take into account technical, quality, design and content are the ones that eventually you would acquire a better positioning. The pagerank is not synonymous with positioning and views, but certainly influences, as several other factors, on the authority of a site. This means we can conclude that there are sites with PR2 or PR3 better positioned than others with PR4 or higher. This is indeed what happens in reality.

The implications of these concepts are not only that links are important at the time of positioning, some bloggers choose to make a lot of links (which is penalized if it does not occur naturally) instead of also direct its resources and efforts, including money to improve other basic factors like site quality, original content, centrality of content, site structure, etc.

Here is an excellent 1 hour video on SEO techniques from a Google expert:

YouTube - Google I/O 2009 - Search Friendly...

[william123]

Page rank is basically the rank of your web page which Google has observed after the certain facts.After this Authority come which check this thing as well.

[RedEvo]

Originally Posted by trafficwiz

The Pagerank of a site is a numeric value ranging from 0 to 10 that Google assigns to a site according to the amount of incoming links it has.

No it isn't.

d

[Mohit Anand]

Originally Posted by RedEvo

No it isn't.

d

Well, there are obviously other factors as well. According to Google:

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important".

Elaborated by Wikipedia:

In other words, a PageRank results from a "ballot" among all the other pages on the World Wide Web about how important a page is. A hyperlink to a page counts as a vote of support. The PageRank of a page is defined recursively and depends on the number and PageRank metric of all pages that link to it ("incoming links"). A page that is linked to by many pages with high PageRank receives a high rank itself. If there are no links to a web page there is no support for that page.