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Having recently posted about PageRank I wanted to expand on it a little here, not the recent update but the confusion and myths often associated with PR. I had a few emails after the post, asking questions about PageRank most making over exaggerate claims and misleading assumptions on its impact in relation to their search engine rankings.

The truth is many Webmasters often obsess over the importance of PageRank in relation to their Page Rank. Note two words, "Page Rank" not PageRank (PR), two different things. PR is just one of the many factors that Google uses to determine a page's actual Page Rank on their search result page (SERP) for a given search query.

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Meta tags are NOT a magic solution to your website appearing at the top of Search Engines. However they do give the site owner some control over how their website is perceived by the search engines. But lets not forget the other important uses of Meta tags such as containing information vital to the correct operation of software like page readers for the blind. It's important to know how to use Meta tags properly and what if any influence they can have on your website rankings.

What is Meta Tag?

Meta Tags are generally placed within the HEAD of a HTML page. These HTML tags can provide the search engines or browsers rendering the content with important information relevant to the webpage. This information could be anything from determining the subject of the page to telling the browser what 'character set' to use.

In this post I am only going to write about two of these tags, 'Title' and 'Meta Description'.

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Today Google launched SearchWiki, the biggest update to their search engine in over year (that we know about). As of today if you log into your Google account and then do a search, you can delete the search results you do not like, promote the ones you do like to the top of the listing and comment on them.

The changes will only apply to your account and not the results of other users however this is part of Googles plan to take the emphasis off rankings and more on content.

A step in the right direction, if we start promoting our favourite sites and all have personalised results then the classic SEO techniques will no longer matter and company's will be forced to write valuable content!

Novelty? Move for the better? Or a way to push paid advertising?

It's an old question that had the SEO community split* for a long time, however at a recent live questions and answer chat with Google's Matt Cutts and Maile Ohye didn't seem to agree either.

Ohye: Having a site for a long period of time can establish credibility with users, and as a search engine we also want to reflect this type of credibility.

Matt Cutts: In the majority of cases, it actually doesn't matter--we want to return the best information, not just the oldest information.

Ok, I am taking the quotes a little out of context and its to make a point about what they were really saying. They did not really have different opinions as webpronews would like us to believe: http://www.webpronews.com/topnews/2008/11/10/google-answers-some-tricky-questions#comments would suggest

Most think this relates back to the problems in 2006 where many old and established domains abruptly dropped down the rankings giving rise to claims Google had taken the age of the domain out of the algorithm trying to stop mature domain selling. In 2008 it was then assumed to be back as old domains started to performing much better again. Was it due to age? I think not.

My conclusion of this is that Google is trying to get a balance using content, backlinks and traffic to determine a website's authority which can be linked in some respect to domain age. A domain must be around for a while to achieve most of the objectives above, right?

Typical A affects B where it was C all along.

PageRank (PR) is Google's way to measure the importance of a page. This system for weighting importance helps Google search engines to identify sites which clearly show relevance to its contents.

PageRank is measured on a scale of one to ten; ten being the highest a site can be awarded (although only a hand full of sites have a ten).

To obtain PR your sites have to have casting votes, worked out on this simple formula, (simple, well not for me)

Quoting from the original Google paper, PageRank is defined like this: We assume page A has pages T1...Tn which point to it (i.e., are citations).

The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. We usually set d to 0.85. There are more details about d in the next section. Also C(A) is defined as the number of links going out of page A. The PageRank of a page A is given as follows:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))