Matt Cutts Talks PageRank
The guide to Google's world takes your coin*, ushers you into the boat, and guides you across the river to the place where search's great adventure resides - his blog post on PageRank.
 | | PageRank Lessons With Matt Cutts |  |
Saying Matt Cutts knows a little about PageRank understates the concept. There's a reason why Cutts has so many followers chasing him at conventions that they are collectively called Cuttlets. If one of them can phrase a question that Cutts can answer about a website, that answer could prove to be the advice leading to a better rank.
That leads to a higher position in the organic search results at Google, and as our readership understands, higher placement equals a greater percentage chance that a given searcher will click on that link. A lot of money is at stake, so interest in Google and its technology like PageRank will remain high.
Cutts' latest post, "More Info on PageRank," takes the form of a question and answer session. Questions ranged from technical minutiae ("How is the PageRank value stored internally, is it a floating-point number as many people suggest or is it just the integer value itself due to the heavy recursive PR computations?") to the general ("Why you are bothering telling us about a new PR update…. is this the first time you ever did?")
Some people may worry a little too much about PageRank:
Lots of folks ask questions like: "Is this PageRank from day X or day Y? And it looks like backlinks are from day Z?"
If you're splitting hairs about the exact date that backlinks were taken from, you're probably suffering from "B.O." (backlink obsession) and should stop and go do something else for a bit until the backlink obsession passes. I highly recommend keyword analysis, looking at server logs to figure out new content to add, thinking of new hooks to make your site attract more word-of-mouth buzz, pondering how to improve conversion once visitors land on your site, etc.
As one might expect, there are probably infinity minus one variations on the question of PageRank and search results:
"Will this PR update affect SERPs? Are we going to have also a SERP data refresh / update?"
By the time you see newer PageRanks in the toolbar, those values have already been incorporated in how we score/rank our search results. So while you may be happy to see that the Google Toolbar shows a little more PageRank for a given page, it's not as if that causes a change in search results at that point. So you won't see any search engine result page (SERP) changes as a result of this PageRank export-those changes have been gradually baking in since the last PageRank export.
Will Cutts make this a revisted topic? He certainly has the demand. Several of the comments on his post ask more questions of PageRank, so he has the material to do this again, and probably could do so for as long as he cares to answer them.
*Give yourself a pat on the back if you knew the name of the coin without Googling searching for it.
---
Tags: PageRank, Google, Matt Cutts
Add to  Del.icio.us |  Digg |  Yahoo! My Web |  Furl
Bookmark WebProNews: 
Receive
Our Daily Email of Breaking eBusiness News
About the Author:
David Utter is a staff writer for WebProNews covering technology and business.
 Insider Reports RSS Feed
More Insider Reports Articles
Contact WebProNews |
