Google PageRank Explained for SEO Beginners Ep. 574

Hi, and welcome to the SEO podcast, Unknown Secrets of Internet Marketing. My name is Chris Burris, one of the owners of EWR Digital. And my name is Matt Bertram, the lead strategist here at EWR Digital. Welcome back to another fun-filled edition of our show. We're doing things a little different. You may notice if you're watching, and you should be watching, you can watch us on YouTube. Make sure you subscribe and follow. You'll notice that we're back in our respective offices. Matt's getting ready to go out of town. I'm getting ready to go out of town. We're busy as all get out, both of us. And so we're like, hey, let's just crank one of these out. Let's get together remotely. Let's pretend it's COVID and still do a podcast. Well, you know, for everybody that continues to listen to us on the different platforms and the true podcasting format, we haven't gone anywhere. Maybe the sound quality is a little bit better. I don't know. But we've been really working on that. We've been really working on that. And hopefully you're enjoying this. And we got another great article for you. Google PageRank Explained for SEO Beginners. And PageRank is not something that is always talked about. We thought we'd bring it back to the forefront. And, you know, great article by Dixon Jones. So thank you. A tip to Mr. Dixon. Yeah. Before we jump into that article, though, I do want to, we got a review. Also, if you'll notice here behind me, you see these two awards? Yes. We actually won another award. It's in the other room. I should have brought it. But we have another award. We got it for Print Collateral. I don't know if you know any details about it. Yeah. So it was a client we brought on that's in the gaming industry. And they were doing a Series A. And we did some graphic design work for them. We put together a really nice deck, a landing page, really wanted them to put their best foot

forward to investors. And they were able to raise a bunch of money and really great work by our creative team. We certainly are known for SEO. But I think the last three years, we've also won graphic design and creative awards, branding awards. So we're certainly building out that piece of the business and certainly excited to continue to be recognized for great work. It was a, it was a great event. Again, that's American Marketing Association Award. My wife and I- Oh, Chris. We also won a Hermes Award. Oh, yeah. We won a Hermes Award for a multi-channel campaign, a large campaign. So that was, that was a lot of fun too. So yeah, there's a lot of good things happening over here at EWR, not to be confused with the airlines. Okay. Or the airport. Or LaGuardia, right? Or, or, or Newark or something like that. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, um, Google, we'll figure it out. We're working on it. I knew that was an issue when we launched. Um, but I think we're figuring it out. So yeah. All right. We got a review. This review is of course, five stars. Hey, we got that time. That was good. Uh, Susan Takla is the name and it's, uh, uh, I had a wonderful consultation with Adam, knowledgeable and professional. I highly recommend EWR digital for your marketing needs. Uh, put Tiff to Suzanne Takla, uh, great review, Adam, great job on delivering value to, uh, yeah. Customers. Gotta love it. Uh, also, however you found us, right? If somebody tweeted it, if somebody shared it with you, do that for somebody else, please like, like just do that. Let's get the word out there. There's a lot of value in these podcasts. We've actually put in a lot of work into these podcasts and we would appreciate if you would share. Yeah. Please, please share it. Um, we appreciate it. If you know somebody that needs digital marketing services, uh, or needs to hear, uh, like is down on themselves that their digital marketing or

SEO is not working. Uh, that's where we shine. Absolutely. All right. So let's, uh, let's jump into this, um, article taking it way back, right? Page rank. I mean, you know, Matt, there may be people who are SEOs and talented who never really dealt with page rank. Cause at some point we'll talk about when they took away the toolbar and that would be long ago enough that somebody could have come into the industry, uh, and working in SEO, been talented and then like not have ever seen a page rank toolbar. Like that's kind of crazy, isn't it? Well, you know, this, I think actually about six years ago, um, you know, they, they certainly made some changes, but there was a lot of, well, not so good SEOs out there that were making sites through software and different things to make huge sites with huge number of pages. Right. And they were manipulating pink rate page rank and page rank was, was used like, I guess maybe DA is used now. And it was really being used, not how Google intended it to be used. And so they got rid of that metric cause they don't really want people focused on it. But if you want to get back to the foundation, uh, of SEO and you want to get back to the fundamentals, understanding how the search engine works is key. And pink is a big, big part of that. So absolutely. All right. Well, let's jump into this, uh, again, Patif to Dixon Jones, uh, page rank was once at the very core of search and was what make made Google the empire that it is today. We're going to cover these things in this, uh, in this podcast, in this article, what is page rank, the history of how page rank evolved, how page rank revolutionized search toolbar page rank versus page rank, uh, how page rank works, how page rank flows between pages and is page rank still used today. And I'm sure you're all very interested. What is the consensus

is page rank still used today. But first we're going to start on what is page rank created by Google founders, Larry page and sir, Sergey Brin, uh, page rank is the algorithm based on the combined relative strengths of all the hyperlinks on the internet. Like that's easy to say, we're going to get into actually describing it. Most people argue that the name was based on Larry pages, last name. Uh, others suggest that page refers to the webpage. It's probably the case that it's both like, yeah, I mean, I love all the lore, right? Like back, back when SEO wasn't even a thing yet and search engines were new. Um, there's so much lore. I really, I really enjoy it. And here's the thing, right? You think about Google and you think about the pixel phone, right? Yeah. Engineers put Easter eggs and all kinds of funny stuff all over the place. If you're in the digital marketing space, you know what a pixel is. It's how to remarket to people. The engineers named it pixel for a reason. And it's kind of funny that they're like, basically you're giving us everything that you do. It's a great surveillance device. It's a great marketing tool. And, and you're just giving Google everything they need to know everything about you. And we're going to just call the phone a pixel. Like that's why they called it that. And okay. It's a great name, but it's both like that, like, and engineers are funny about that sort of thing. And so, yeah, I had never heard that. That's pretty, that's pretty awesome. You like the pixel. It's pretty obvious too, right? It makes perfect sense. All right. So when Page and Bren were at Stanford University, they wrote a paper and that paper was titled The Page Rank Citation Ranking, Bringing Order to the Web. It was published in January of 1999. That's the year that I started ewebstyle.com. That was back in 1999. So we actually started at the same year they published the paper. So Google

didn't actually exist when we started. The paper demonstrates a relatively simple algorithm for evaluating the strengths of web pages. And there's a figure here. I don't know if you were in a position to pull it up. It's really, actually, if you pulled it up, it wouldn't be of much value. It's just a lot of lines. It's really kind of confusing. This is the IP stuff that is sometimes these diagrams are pretty confusing. It's just a bunch of lines connected to a bunch of different pages. And it basically shows you the link equity flow, right? Yep. The paper went on to become a patent in the US, but not in Europe. Apparently in Europe, you cannot patent mathematical formulas. So they did not patent it in Europe. And it's got a flow chart from the patent. It's got that previously kind of confusing, really almost thought map of where the links are going between pages. Stanford University actually owns the patent and has assigned it to Google. The patent is currently due to expire in 2026. Excuse me, seven. So we got four more years before that expires. It'll be interesting. And I'll kind of bring that back up a little bit later. All right. So let's a history of how PageRank evolved. During their time at Stanford in the late 1990s, both Bryn and Page were looking at using links to work out how important each page was relative to another, which was a revolutionary way to order pages. Nobody had figured out this kind of voting system that we talk on here regularly. The idea quickly turned into Google. Google's initially, the idea was so solid that it initially launched as a search engine, as a company with no ability to earn revenue, right? And while Google at the time was known as BackRub, did you know that? I didn't know that. I did not know that. No. BackRub? It was the search engine. PageRank was the algorithm it used to rank pages in the search engine results pages, search. Isn't that cool? BackRub.

Yeah, I'm learning. I love doing these podcasts. I learn something new all the time. Now, the Google dance. One of the challenges of PageRank was that the math, while simple, needed to be iteratively processed. The calculations runs multiple times over every page and every link on the internet. At the turn of the millennium, this math took several days to process. So the Google SERPs would move up and down. The actual first position, second, third position would move up and down during that time. And these changes were often erratic. This was known as the Google dance. A kind of tongue in cheek, you just mentioned engineers love to do this. The Google dance later became the name of the annual party that Google ran for SEO experts in Mountain View. All right. So let's talk. There's a couple of things here that I ended up skipping over. Let's talk about the retreat of PageRank. So Google's algorithm was initially believed to be unspammable. Isn't that kind of like a counterintuitive? Never say that. Anybody that says that kind of stuff opens themselves up for people. Like, we're unhackable. Yeah. Don't say that. Like, then everybody's going to try to hack you. Yeah. Bad plan. They thought it because of all the other search engines were just based on the content on the page and people were already gaming that system, right? This was quote unquote unhackable because it required the votes from other people on the internet, right? This gave, well, Google's confidence did not last long. PageRank started to become problematic as the backlink industry grew. In fact, the backlink industry grew because PageRank was a way of ranking pages. Like, that's exactly what happened. The PageRank toolbar was withdrawn by 2016, right? So we're looking at what, 64, eight years ago. That's what I'm saying. Somebody could be in the SEO industry for eight years and have never seen and be experts and be very talented and have never seen the PageRank toolbar. Isn't that Chris, do you remember when there was like a

glitch in the system and Google showed you like, it wasn't PageRank, but it was like the value of every page. Like they, they had some kind of formula that they could see on the backend that they accidentally, it was for like a couple hours showed you all this data and a couple really smart individuals, which I was not one of them at the time, uh, mind like a ton of that data because it was like something that Google didn't like from the mathematical forms that want you to show they showed it. It gave so much insight. They took it down. Uh, do you remember that or no? I don't, I don't remember that, but yeah, that seems like an engineering thing. Also, you, you name it, Google dance and have the dance, your actual dances, name it after it. Also you push something without double checking that your echo check is not turned on. What is it? Uh, uh, test and production. Yeah. Yeah. Test and iterate or whatever release and iterate. Uh, Google spent many years encouraging SEO professionals away from manipulating links through its Google guidelines, right? That's the documentation and through advice from its spam team headed by Matt cuts. Uh, that was a, it was headed by him until 2017. Also there could be SEO experts who never actually followed up with Matt cuts, right? They didn't know who Matt cuts was. And he was, uh, very big, big, big, big, big, very important. Um, actually when I was reading this, I thought about kind of like, where is Matt cuts now? Like he's still at the company. He's doing something else. He has a personal blog out there that I've, I've checked on a few times. Yeah. Yeah. So, so Google's algorithm were also changing during this time where they were focused on trying to dissuade people away from manipulating links. Uh, the company has been relying less and less on page rank. So let's talk about toolbar page rank versus page rank. Google was initially so proud of its

algorithm that it was happy to publicly share the result of its calculation. By the way, in the interest, if you think back to Google's mission, right? What would make information accessible to everyone sharing the page rank on a page that you might land on could give you some indication of how credible that particular page is? Yes. Right. And so the reason I think that they released it, you know, obviously not in hindsight, not the best decision because people then have a very specific number to focus on and game, um, was to help people understand if what they're looking at is a good site or not. Well, I mean, you know, domain authority and some of these tools like, um, age refs or, uh, you know, as SEM rush or, uh, whatever, they all have their own way to calculate it. Right. The domain authority, the, um, you know, page authority, backlink profile, those sorts of things. Uh, you know, a bunch of these different tools use different things. Uh, so, so it's been somewhat replaced, but, but keep going. Yeah. Well, and, and, and actually that's mentioned in here, he mentions Moz and Majestic and some of their data. And there was one sentence where he very specifically called, um, said that, uh, yeah, Majestic in particular had been able to correlate its own calculations quite well with page rank, right? Yeah. No, Majestic's great, great for off page. Yeah. Uh, so the page rank toolbar made the algorithm extremely visible. It was clear that links were the easiest way to game Google. Um, a secondary market was formed buying and selling links valued, uh, on the page rank of the UR URL where the link was sold. And so that's a, that's a challenge that they had to, had to deal with. Um, it's how, how page rank revolutionizes search. Uh, other search engines relied heavily on analyzing the content on each page individually. These methods had little to identify the difference between an influential page and one simply written with random and, or

manipulated text. Yeah. Oh my gosh. SEO was such a mess back in the day. I, I remember being able to submit a page, refresh the search result and see the changes that I had just made change the position on the result page. Yeah. Now they sandbox stuff. And, and I, I don't know exactly. You'd have to go back and look at the patents on, on how long they do that for, but I have seen for like, if you're new of building domain authority in a certain section, it could be up to 90 days. Okay. Um, maybe even a little bit on the, far side of 90 days where you're doing all the right things. And then finally it like punches through. Um, and, and, and I think, you know, they're looking at consistency, like they're trying to get the overnight spammers out of there. They want you to have to work for it, to earn it, to, uh, make sure you're doing all the right things before they reward you in, in, in certain areas. Um, so yeah, they don't, it does not happen immediately unless you're like already in the category. Like if you're in the top three positions to move around the top three, that stuff happens pretty immediate, right? It, there's all kinds of, uh, at different areas of where you are in the top 100, um, what's going to happen. And I would also tell you to get in the top 100, to get in the Google index, Chris, you got to be the best in the world. And there's millions of callbacks for that. Right. And your website's got to present that information in a way that's going to even make it into Google's directory. And it is Google's directory. Okay. We do forget that. It's not a public utility. Yeah. Yet. Maybe. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a private company that has their own directory that you're abiding by the rules to use. And you should also, as an SEO, um, know that. Yeah. Um, so because all the other

search engines were focused on just the content on the page, it was easy for SEO pros to manipulate that, right? They can manipulate the content back then it was keyword stuffing, uh, which actually keyword stuffing worked for on Google for quite some time, too. Um, it soon overtook the main incumbents of the day, such as Alta Vista ink Tomy, which was powered, uh, which powered MSN among others. Well, Chris keyword stuffing was, it was overused and any marketers going to typically like overuse stuff, uh, to, to a large degree. Um, man, do I have my, I don't know. Uh, but what, what I would tell you about that is early in the early days of the search engine, it was hard to get Google to understand what you were talking about, right? The AI wasn't as smart. So you were continually giving it new signals to hopefully understood what the page was about. Certainly if you gave too many signals and, and the algorithms weren't mature enough, uh, or the neural network or wasn't mature enough to understand what you were asking, you, you know, you would push it too far and there was standard deviations on, on, on what you could and couldn't do, but you can manipulate them. Right. Um, and to, to a certain degree in, in certain areas, this is, is still the case where the AI hasn't developed enough, uh, like AI or, or like image images and stuff like that and alt text. But, um, it didn't start off bad. It was like giving Google a little bit more signals on what your stuff was about. Right. And now that the, um, you know, the, the, the algorithms have come such a long way, you don't have to do all that stuff anymore. It understands what you're talking about. Right. And so really now it, it, it's hurting you more than it's helping you because, um, you want to write a natural language. And if Google sees that you're not writing a natural language and, and the keyword density

is a lot higher, uh, than the normal, because it's also always comparing you against your competitors. Uh, if you get outside that standard deviation, you hit, you start getting into penalty range. So yeah, no keyword stuffing, keyword stuffing bad. All right. So let's talk about how it works. So the formula for page rank comes in a number of forms, but can be explained in a few sentences. Initially, every page on the internet is given an estimated page rank score. This could be any number historically page rank was presented to the public as a score between zero and 10. Uh, the page rank for that page is then divided by the number of links out from that page resulting in a smaller fraction. Uh, the page rank is then distributed out to the linked pages and the same is done for every other page on the internet. And that's done. So you really kind of just cascade this out, uh, for every page. And then you iterate and you say for the next iteration of the algorithm, the new estimate for the page rank, right? So the page you kind of started on ended up being the target at some point, and it ended up with some fraction of rank from the pages pointing to it. And now it's got a new page rank number. The next iteration of the algorithm, that new estimate for page rank for each page is the sum of all the fractions of pages that link into each. I just said that that's just me reading it. There is a damping factor, which was described as the chance that a person surfing the web might stop surfing altogether. That piece, I got to be honest, I don't really understand how that damping factor comes in, but basically it would go through, it would start with some number, it would calculate how everybody ended up at the page rank at the end of the day. And then it would do it again and do it again until it settled into an equilibrium.

And then that was the page rank of every page. So let me, I can speak to that a little bit. I lost you a little bit on what you were saying completely. But what I will tell you that is a good rule of thumb is basically what I think it was saying is if they click on a page and they click on another page, right? And then they click on another page and they click on another page and they're surfing through the internet, right? Not going back to the search engine, but going through the backlinks. You don't want a site and Google actually penalizes sites that keep all that SEO juice or that link equity to themselves. So it wants it redistributed. It wants basically from one page, it could jump to another page to jump to another page to jump to another page to cover all the pages and to come in like full circle, right? Like they could go through the whole internet and get back to you. And so you want everybody kind of locking hands, singing kumbaya, linking to other people, because this was built based on, um, well, scientists, right. That were meant to share information. And when you're sharing information, uh, you, you want other people to be connected to it. Right. And so I think that that might be what you were talking about, but I was, I was blanking out a little bit. So, well, there's two things and you actually bring a point that I didn't highlight, but because you brought it up, I'll, I'll, I'll talk about it. What it would do if there was a page that did not have an outbound link, effectively link juice ends up on that page and has nowhere to go. And so what does the algorithm do with it? Well, what the algorithm does with it is it divides that juice among all the pages that it's considering. And what that ended up meaning is a web page, without any links to it could actually have some page

rank because it, uh, it got it through effectively kind of osmosis or by default saying, Hey, that's a page that's out here. There's no links to it, but it got some link juice because there was a, there are a number of pages that don't have links out from them. So that's one piece. And the other one is just this iterative process where it's cascading the page rank, and then it has to re and that ends up with a new page rank for the first page that you started on. And then you start with that new page rank and cascade it. And so you just keep doing that until it reaches some sort of equilibrium because it's going to, it's going to move in that direction. Yeah. Kind of cool stuff. All right. Problems and iterations for the formula, the formula, uh, you know, like every formula has some challenges. If they page, uh, and here's where I cover this. If a page does not link out to any other page, then the formula will not reach an equilibrium. Uh, so newer pages whilst potentially more important than other pages will have a lower page rank, right? If you just throw up a new page, maybe it's significantly more valuable. And especially if you think about how good Google is at showing you modern, you know, current information on like, well, just current information. Hey, this is something that's happening because of a election yesterday. That page that's disgusting, discussing yesterday's election, when you put it up would have no page rank, right? Cause it has no inbound links cause you just put it up. And so Google has found a way to, to manage that. So, so query query desires freshness, um, is, is, and then, and then you got, uh, getting Google news certified and, and I was, uh, hearing about Google's really looking at Google news certification and they're, they're doing stuff in that area. Um, so it's pretty interesting. Um, we don't have a lot of clients and we don't build a

lot of stuff in like, uh, that deal with Google news, but I do have, uh, some other, uh, associates in the industry that they do a lot of that. And it's a whole kind of different thing. Uh, just kind of like affiliate stuff. It's a whole different thing. Um, so, uh, super interesting, but, but Google definitely accounts for it. And, um, I, I think Google's getting really good. Like I, I think Google's getting really good and you got to hit, you got to hit a lot of things and do it right. And it's a full, full, full, full time kind of experience to get your digital brand online aligned properly. Like that, you know, it's very, it's, you know, you, it's really difficult to do. Uh, and, and you need a whole team to, to get that going. And there's so many different parts of that. Um, because Google, again, it's trying to index and categorize all information on the internet. So it's pulling from all kinds of sources, whether it be, um, you know, papers or videos or images, uh, or social media sites, uh, authorship. Um, I mean, there's so many different factors, right. That Google's pulling into this to, to determine should this person rank, uh, here or not. Right. Like in this place. So yeah, it's a big deal. And by the way, I'm going to have a book recommendation at the end of this, because if this is like, it is interesting, uh, to you kind of going back and understanding this, the algorithm, um, there's a book that talks about the, the kind of the evolution of the company and, uh, it's pretty phenomenal. I'll share that at the end. Um, all right. So, uh, how does page rank flow between pages? If a page starts with the value of five and has 10 links out, then every page it links to is given 0.5 page rank, uh, less the damping factor. In this way, the page rank flows around the internet between iterations. That really kind of discover

the describes like the beginning, um, how it's working. The question is, is page rank still used? So although public asset access to page rank was removed in 2016, it is believed the score is still available to search engineers within Google. A leak of the Yandex, which we discussed right, uh, in that podcast, go back and look at that. Yandex is the equivalent of Google in Russia, uh, showed that page rank remained as a factor that it could use. Um, which is an interesting question. You know, the patent is here in the U S not there in Russia. Uh, does the Yandex, I never was really aware of it, but if it's focused on Russian, then there's no reason for us to be aware of it, but maybe it stayed out of the U S because of that, uh, Google engine. Cause that, cause that patent is still good through, uh, 2027. Yeah. Yeah. In the U S I don't know all the legalities, uh, of it all. Um, but certainly interesting stuff. Google engineers have suggested that the original form of page rank was replaced with its new approximation that requires less processing power to calculate. Uh, engineers and mathematicians are very smart. So they probably found a better way than like what, what we're talking about. And it's super interesting. And, and this is what I'm seeing Google's now with do follow and no follow links. Google's starting to like say, we're looking at everything and we're just looking at it as signals. And we may take this into advisement or we may not like they can just decide if they want to do it or not. And so you just said may use this as a factor. Well, they're going to be running all these, you know, different algorithms. And so sometimes in certain searches, they're going to use it. And then other times they're not like, I mean, it's getting really, really complex and each keyword combination, which 70% of all searches or 75% of all searches are new searches still. Um,

Google has to make all these decisions, right? Uh, and, and so choosing algorithms to, to figure that out. And, and there's only really one perfect combination for that first position. And no one knows what that is for Google and you just have to be better than everybody else and try to hit as many as you can with that page. But like Google wants to probably see one page for every combination of keywords in the search. Like if you were going to be in first position or everything, right? Cause if you change the keywords over here, based on the algorithm, it's not going to be perfect. Right. So like there's, there's no, there's only one perfect setup for every single search. And so you're just trying to be better than everybody else, uh, be as best you can and organize information as best as possible. Um, and you can rank and you can have domain authority in a lot of different areas. Um, but I, that's a big thing that I see is people try to become domain experts in too many categories when they don't have enough page rank or domain authority, you know, or what, whatever you have, and you're spreading that out too much, whether it is, um, quality of content or depth of content or, um, you know, page rank, right? Like you can, you only have so much to, to, to, to disperse throughout your website based on your authority. And, and if you, if you try to spread yourself too thin, you can run into trouble. And we've seen that with a lot of clients that come to us. So yeah. Can you hear me? I'm sorry. I didn't, I didn't have the mic right in front of me. I apologize. As the new clients are coming in, we see, we see that often, regardless of what other algorithms Google might choose to call upon page rank likely remains embedded in many of the search giants systems to this day. Um, great article, Dixon Jones, Patif to you, uh, really

good stuff. That book is actually, I'm feeling lucky. The confession confessions of Google employee number 59. And I'm just going to give you some behind the scenes stuff. Number 59 was, uh, was a marketing guy. And it turns out that, um, Larry and Sergey were, did not believe in marketing, right? They actually felt like if it's the best product out there, it doesn't need any marketing. So it, I mean, it's the kind of the stresses of this guy who is the marketing guy in a company where the two lead guys don't give a hoot about marketing. And so very, it was, it's a fascinating story. It gets into like servers and an engineer, like shutting down, I don't know, Serbia because of some reason, cause they weren't cooperating for like, it's a fascinating read, like highly recommend it. Could not recommend it more. Hey, if, uh, if you'd like to grow your business with the largest, simplest marketing tool on the planet, the internet, go to EWR digital for increased revenue in your business. Just once you arrive at EWR digital.com, click the free consultation button. I think that testimonial that we read earlier that Adam did, uh, may have been part of a free consultation. Go ahead and take advantage of that free consultation. You will get value. You will be, uh, moved to leave a five-star review. Uh, go take advantage of that free consultation schedule a time that works for you. Um, you got anything else to wrap up? No, I think you did a great job. That was awesome. Thank you. All right. Until the next podcast, my name is Chris Burris. My name is Matt Bertram. Bye bye for now.