Pagerank Is About Counting Links

Worrying about pagerank, or the lack thereof, is largely a waste of time. While much has been written about pagerank, it has next to nothing to do with how well your webpages rank in the SERPs.

Much has been written about pagerank. There are webpages out there that actually discuss the mathematics of computing pagerank. From a search engine optimization point of view, all of that is totally useless information. Do you know how to calculate your pagerank? Or, what a dangling link is? I do not. And, I certainly would not waste any of my valuable time trying to figure it out, either.The importance of pagerank is overrated.

PageRank is basically what Google has used to promote its search engine as offering superior search results. Whether or not Google’s results are superior to other search engines and whether or not pagerank has anything to with it at all, is all highly debatable.

PageRank is About Counting Links

Pagerank is basically about Web sites voting on the value of webpages. Anytime you see the word pagerank mentioned, you should be thinking in terms of the number of webpages that actually link to a given webpage. Internal links from your own webpages certainly do count. The fact that Google considers some inbound links to be more valuable than others is totally besides the point.

Computing PageRank

For Web sites without deep linking, Google decreases the home page’s pagerank by one for each sub-directory level away a given page is from the home page. Deep or cross-linking is how Web sites can increase the pagerank of its internal webpages so that this rule of thumb no longer applies to them.

To claim that outbound links leak link juice and, thus, are a drain upon your maximum pagerank is total nonsense. Just remember the 100 maximum hyperlinks on a single webpage, rule of thumb. In most cases you wont come close to the 100 hyperlinks maximum. Furthermore, every external hyperlink on a webpage has to be maintained. Voting on external webpages creates a maintainence nightmare that can be extremely time consuming. So, the fewer number of external hyperlinks on a webpage the better.