PageRank is probably NOT as important as most people think.

Don't get me wrong. PageRank IS important, but it's only one of over 100 things Google looks at to decide which pages get to be in the top 10. In a nut shell here's how Google uses PageRank.

When someone searches for a phrase, Google finds the web pages that have that phrase included. Then Google determines the relevancy of each page to the searched-for phrase by analyzing many different things. They look for the phrase in the title tag, in the headings, frequency of use and 100 other things to determine how relevant a page is likely to be to the phrase being searched for . . .

THEN, Google multiples the relevancy number they came up with by the PageRank number. The highest number shows up #1.

You could have a Google PageRank (PR) such as, PR=8 and still not show up in the top 50 pages of search results if your page was not relevant to the searched for phrase.

Likewise, if you have a well-designed page that is very relevant to the phrase, you could have a #1 listing with a PR=1. I know, I have some new pages that still have a PR=1, but they show up #1 for some keyword phrases.

Therefore, don't spend all of your time working on getting a high PageRank. Spend most of your time designing web pages that have good content and then incoming links and high PageRank will go a long way towards taking care of themselves.

Jerry Minchey

Copyright 2003 - 2004

Note: This article may be reproduced if it is reproduced in it's entirety and the statement below is prominently included at the end of the article.

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Jerry Minchey is a long time student and practitioner of search engine optimization and is the editor of the website, www.SearchEngineU.com which is dedicated to showing search engine beginners how to achieve high rankings on Google and other search engines using website optimization techniques. ========================================================