Chris Bennetts - Internet Consultant

In my previous post I mentioned changes to how Google evaluates websites but before talking about these change we need to understand the model that search engines have used up until now which is best described as a popularity model with the popularity determined by the number of incoming links. 

Google introduced the Page Rank (PR) system which rated sites between 0 and 10.  The voting power of this ranking system was referred to as link juice by those engaged in SEO.  The higher the PR the more link juice it provided.

What confused many people was that PR has nothing to do with a sites actual position in organic results.  You could have a PR1 site #1 for a particular search term and a PR5 #2 for the same term.  PR was only a measurement of the voting power of a site to vote for other sites.  It was also a indication of the “trust” and “authority” of a site.

As mentioned a sites PR alone had very little to do with a sites position in organic results.  What mattered was the incoming links to the site and the “anchor text” used.  

To better explain this imagine you create a site about “wooden floors” and on the site talk only about wooden floors never mentioning the word “timber” but a whole lot of sites start linking to you using the keyword “timber floors” in the anchor text of their link to you.   If enough sites with sufficient link juice “say” you are timber floors then your site could come up #1 for “timber floors” and might not have any ranking for “wooden floors”. 

In this way you can see that what you do to your own site (onsite SEO) had very little to do with how you rank in the search engines. More important was what other sties said about you and how many other sties said it. 

This seemed like a logical and fair system but it was not long before webmasters learned how to manipulate this voting system.  Websites with high PR became a commercial commodity and links (backlinks) from these high PR sites were being sold.   Google banned this practice threatening to penalize any high PR site that sold backlinks.

The war between Google and the blackhat webmaster raged and Google kept changing and tweaking its algorithm as the spammers found new ways to manipulate results. Google stopped publishing the lists of backlinks for sites as this information enabled SEO analysts to work out what Google was looking for and better understand the algorithm. 

Google also announced that its PR system was no longer an important consideration in ranking sites in organic results and should be ignored.  At the time they announced this PR was still very central to SEO and it was interpreted by SEO webmasters as misinformation but perhaps it was an expression of their intention to move away from the PR model.