Why should everyone know these things? Because google itself has said them!
I've said some of this in another thread already, but there are some things about google tech/PR everyone should know, and reading threads here I get the feeling a lot of people don't know them.
All the things I'm about to say are based on this two pages: Google Corporate Info and Google Technology. So I really haven't made any of this up myself.
Okay, on to the real stuff I'd like to say.
First, here's a quote from the google technology page:
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The heart of our software is PageRank™, a system for ranking web pages developed by our founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. And while we have dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of Google on a daily basis, PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of our web search tools.
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So, while some doubt this, PR is still part of the search algo.
We continue reading:
Quote:
PageRank Explained
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important."
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This describes PR as most of us know it. "Votes" or BL's from high PR pages are valued more than BL's from low PR pages.
Quote:
Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don't match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page's content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it's a good match for your query.
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This shows that in order to list high, not only is it nice to have a high PR, it's more important that your content is relevant and that the content of the pages linking to you is relevant. So, maybe gaining BL's on irrelevant sites could harm your serp listing.
Now let's see what the corporate info has to tell us:
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Google uses PageRank™ to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important. It then conducts hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted. By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, Google is able to put the most relevant and reliable results first.
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This part is almost the same as the last part of the google tech thingie, but it confirms that both PR and query-specific relevance make up the search results.
Quote:
PageRank Technology: PageRank performs an objective measurement of the importance of web pages by solving an equation of more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Instead of counting direct links, PageRank interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote for Page B by Page A. PageRank then assesses a page's importance by the number of votes it receives.
PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. Important pages receive a higher PageRank and appear at the top of the search results. Google's technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page's importance. There is no human involvement or manipulation of results, which is why users have come to trust Google as a source of objective information untainted by paid placement.
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I think this part is mostly interesting because it has emphasis on the "objective" part, showing google won't manipulate PR (accept for banned sites) and even more important, that PR is purely based on the linking structure of the web, not on content of a specific website.
Last thing I found interesting:
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Google also analyzes the content of neighboring web pages to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user's query.
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See "neighboring". Above we saw that the relevance of pages linking to a page is important, but here's the word "neighboring". This could mean that relevance of pages a page is linking to is important as well, which means you might not want to link to irrelevant pages.
