Seo Services Spain Blog

Many of those new to SEO become almost obsessed at times with the little green bar in their browsers (Google Toolbar) and see it as some kind of victory or trophy that says “Yes, Ive made it” its all down hill from here! If only it were that simple!

So what does pagerank really mean in terms of ranking and SEO?

Pagerank is a Google algorithm that was named after Larry Page one of the two Google founders and is supposed to represent and indicate to a sites visitor the overall link popularity of a page or an indication of the amount of citations/votes (links) there are too that page. Although this is partly correct and it must be stated that this is a rather simplistic view of pagerank, it still does not reflect the true meaning of pagerank and what bearing it has on our sites performance.

If you want to see an example of a site that has massive pagerank on almost all of its 479,000 pages then take a look at http://www.doaj.org/. This was recently highlighted by Eric Wards post titled “Where trust lives”.

As you browse through the site, ask yourself why does this site have so much pagerank?

Ok finished? Well although the site is relatively new (2003) it actually has over 10,000 links from .edu domains (normally highly trusted by Google as they are academic sites) and over 250 links from .gov domains (govermental sites) that are trusted even more by Google and the other search engines.

This brings me onto my next point. In the above paragraph you will notice that I used the word “trusted”. This my friends is what it is all about.

In a web full mostly of crap and spam its even more important that you obtain links from trusted resources and this will only come if you HAVE a trusted resource yourself that people are happy to link too. You see, its not about pagerank, its about “TrustRank”. The more you are trusted by the engines and other sites (links) the better you will fair and the more successful you will become.

If you want to be trusted more, you need to build a site that is easy to navigate and more importantly is full of authorative content within your field that people will find of great use and interest and at the same time will be happy to link to in some way. If you don’t have any interesting or link worthy content on your site, you are fighting an uphill battle, as you won’t have anything of any real value to market and promote.

So don’t be a cowboy. Differentiate yourself from the competition in terms of the value and experience you add to your users lives and eventually you will build more trustrank and in turn better rankings and traffic. Get inside the minds of your users, find out what they really want or the answers to the questions they are looking for and give them just that!

Oh and forget about link building so much. People will do that for you “naturally” the more they see you and your brand as a source of trustworthy and informative content.

For more information on the pagerank formula take a look at the paper written by Brin and Page while at Stanford University http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html Its an old doc but is a great read.