The 5 Myths About Google Pagerank

The recent Toolbar RageRank update once again has generated a lot of
discussion in the SEO community. Webmasters report their websites receiving
not much more traffic despite the increased visible PageRank. In numerous
forum threads people question the reliability of toolbar values. By
unveiling the following five myths I hope to answer to some of the
uncertainties caused by this update.

1. PageRank values range from 0 to 10.

While some people believe that PageRank is an integer number or at least
converge to an integer after intensive recursive calculations, actually it
is a floating point number. Google rounds up the real value to the closest
integer and puts it on the 0-10 scale which is displayed in your browser
toolbar.

2. PageRank value displayed in the toolbar is the one used to rank the
results.

As you might have noticed, the toolbar value is updated every few months
with no regular intervals. In the present time Google continuously
calculates and updates PageRank so that sometimes actual PageRank and its
toolbar values can differ.
The toolbar value should be considered not as a current rank but as a level
your page has reached by the time of the latest toolbar update.

3. PageRank is the primary factor to rank the search results.

Not exactly. PageRank was the backbone of the Google success as a search
engine because of its integrity, ability to use the unique democratic nature
of the web and hyperlinks, and relatively high immunity to abuse. But as
years passed the Google technology became far more sophisticated. Now Google
uses a cloud of factors to rank its search results. Some of them are query
specific (keyword saturation of the page copy and the backlinks'anchor text)
and some of them are domain specific (domain age, keywords in domain name,
and of course PageRank). Nobody outside the Google's offices knows the
actual weight of each factor and it is quite possible that PageRank is no
longer the primary one.

4. Google toolbar shows an increase of PageRank for my pages.
My traffic is going to skyrocket!

Wrong. There won't be any sudden traffic increase after toolbar upgrades any
more. As I said before, the continuous calculation and update of the
Google's internal PageRank means that the rankings also adjust gradually as
your pages get or lose backlinks. So the toolbar upgrade itself will not
cause any changes in search results.

5. Toolbar PageRank is of no use, it is just for entertainment.

This is allegedly a quote by one of the Google representatives.
This is only partially true. The reason why Google doesn't show the actual
PageRank any more is that there have been repeated attempts by hackers to
access an exploit these data. Since 2004 the toolbar values updates are no
longer synchronized with the actual rankings changes, and therefore should
not to be considered too seriously in terms of SEO. However toolbar ranks
still remains the easiest and most obvious way to evaluate the quality of a
page and millions of web users regularly judge websites according to what
Google toolbar shows them.

About The Author: Oleg Ishenko, MCSE, MCDBA, 8 years of IT experience gives
useful advice on search engine optimization and web marketing at his blog
http://SEOResearcher.com
(http://www.seoresearcher.com)

Why You Should Focus On Quality Articles During Article Writing

A lot of website owners are now aware of the fact that writing articles and
submitting them to major article directories like EzineArticles, Isnare, and
GoArticles can go a long way to helping webmasters acquire one way links and
get higher search engine rankings.

I'm not going to deny that links from these directories help.
But getting links from them should not be the end goal; in fact it should
only be your initial goal.

What you should actually be striving to accomplish is having your articles
published on related websites. Those links look far more impressive to
search engines like Google. An example to help clarify it for you - if you
want to get a job as a carpenter and on your resume you only have one
reference - who do you want, Bob Vila or the better known Michael Jordan.
Bob Vila, of course, because he's known for being in your industry.

The major mistake I see people making when writing articles or hiring others
to write their articles is that they're focusing on quantity, trying to put
out as many articles as possible or hiring writers as cheaply as possible to
mass produce articles.
That's a mistake - a MAJOR mistake.

It hurts you in multiple ways. First of all, real people read articles on
the major article directories. You'll get traffic to your site just for
having articles on these sites just from people clicking your resource box
links. However, if your article is full or errors or unhelpful, they're not
likely to visit your site. On the other hand, if your article contained
information that was actually helpful to the reader, they're far more likely
to visit your site and spend their money there.

Second, if you're putting out low quality articles, other webmasters are not
going to want to republish your article on their site. I've visited a lot of
sites where people put articles on them, and the good sites you desperately
want the links from are not using the articles you had written for $5 each
from a writer in India. They're using the articles that were written by
people who are experts on their subjects or articles that are clearly well
thought out and written.

So do yourself a favor if you're in the business of using articles to
promote your site. Commit to only putting out quality work and only hiring
quality writers. Yes, you'll spend more time writing, or more money on your
writers, but try it for six months and you'll be sending me a big thanks.

About The Author: Gary Ruplinger is an SEO expert who has written a report
to help website owners get their sites to the top of search engines with a
detailed step by step plan called the Ultimate Traffic Blueprint - a
completely Free link building report -
http://www.ultimatetrafficblueprint.com