Current Study: 50,000 top webpage's for 1,000 keywords in 5
countries
A series of 1,000 keywords was developed covering a variety
of topics including professions and trades in various UK localities, website
development, marketing, travel and health issues. The webpages on the top page
of Google.co.uk (pages from the web) for each keyword were assessed to
determine their PageRanks and the corresponding HomePage PageRanks. This was
repeated for the USA, Canada, Australia and India using
respectively.com.,.ca.,.com.au., and.co.in. The localities (towns or cities)
were changed for each country. The findings could have been undertaken manually
using either Firefox or Internet Explorer with the Google toolbar active: To
simplify the process, a program that undertakes the analyses was used.
Accordingly, any or all the results can be easily verified.
Nearly 50,000 top positioned webpages were assessed - some
Google results pages do not have the usual full complement of 10 web pages.
There were 2,486 webpages on the top Google results page with PR0 (5%). Of
these, only 214 (0.4%) were on websites with HomePage PageRank less than 4 or
they were not themselves HomePages.
There were 32,179 internal webpages on websites with
HomePage PageRank of 4 or more (64%). There were 14,909 webpages on the top
Google results page that were themselves HomePages with PR4 or lower (30%).
Only 2,912 webpages (5.8%) of the webpages were not the HomePage of the website
that were on the top page of Google for a keyword had associated HomePage
PageRank of 3 or less.
In this study, 94% of nearly 50,000 web pages on the top
Google results page for 1,000 keywords in 5 countries were on Websites with
HomePage PageRank 4 or higher or they were themselves HomePages. This study
supports the view that the top factor in the Google algorithm is the Domain
Authority of the website as indicated by the HomePage PageRank. The second
factor is a boost given to HomePages that are competing for a keyword.
Domain Authority and HomePage PageRank
Search engine optimisers are agreed that incoming links to
webpages are even more important than webpage content in determining webpage
positioning on the search engines such as Google.
It is apparent to anyone regularly conducting searches on
the internet that some websites, such as Wikipedia, often appear on the top
search engine results pages. Such domains are said to carry authority that
lifts them up the positioning algorithms. It is a matter of conjecture as to
how Domain Authority is best defined.
SEOmoz's Domain Authority represents their expert's best
prediction about how a website will perform in search engine rankings. They
recommend using SEOmoz Domain Authority when comparing one site to another or
tracking the "strength" of a website over time. SEOmoz's Domain
Authority is calculated by combining all their other link metrics (linking root
domains, number of total links, MozRank, mozTrust etc.) into a single score.
The SEOmoz's Domain Authority involves a complex derived formula the details of
which are not made publicly available.
Google's PageRank is an indication of Google's evaluation of
the value of incomming links to a web page. It is determined in a two-step
process:
Each link recognised by Google to a webpage is given a value
according to the PageRank of the page giving the link and this is divided by
the number of outgoing links on that page. The value of all the incoming links
to that page is then summated.
All webpages indexed by Google are placed in a table such
that those with the most incoming 'link juice' are at the top - PageRank 10. We
see webpage PageRank as integers 0-10 although Google knows the decimal places.
PageRank is on a logarithmic scale and SEOmoz suggest that it has a base
between 8 and 9 rather than the more conventional base 10. If it is 8 this
would mean that for every web page with PR10 there would be 64 with PR 8, and
858,993,452 pages with PR0.
PageRank was initially of importance as it related to
individual pages but there have been important changes. Google tells us
"When Google was founded, one key innovation was PageRank, a technology
that determined the "importance" of a webpage by looking at what
other pages link to it, as well as other data. Today we use more than 200
signals, including PageRank, to order websites, and we update these algorithms
on a weekly basis." It is apparent that PageRank relates now to websites
and not only to webpages. The most obvious indicator of website PageRank is the
PageRank of the website's HomePage.
The majority of web professionals have come to disregard
PageRank as having meaning in search engine optimisation mainly because there
are many webpages with PageRank 0 on Google's top results pages for highly
competitive keywords. This appropriately leads to the conclusion that the
PageRank of a webpage cannot be the top factor in the Google algorithm. However,
I have previously indicated that the majority of top positioned webpages with
PR0 are either on websites with HomePage PageRank of 4 or more or these
webpages are themselves the HomePage of the website.
The Boost in Effective HomePage PageRank to Home Pages that
are competing for keywords - like handicap in golf.
In this study, there were 2,486 web pages on the top Google
results page with PR0 but only 214 were on websites with HomePage PageRank less
than 4 or they were not themselves HomePages.
Google must be providing a boost in effective PageRank to
HomePages that are competing for a keyword. This can be compared to the
handicap system that allows golfers at different skill levels to compete. From
an SEO perspective, this means, for example, that small businesses with
websites that rarely achieve HomePage PageRank greater than 3, can compete with
locality or trade directory websites that typically have HomePage PageRanks
between 4 and 7. In practice, the boost to HomePage PageRank is to about 4.5.
Implications of the top two factors in the Google algorithm.
HomePage PageRank can be used as a guide to keyword
difficulty provided allowance is made for the effective boost in PageRank to
HomePages competing for keywords.
Websites with low HomePage PageRank, which includes new
websites, only have a realistic chance of top page positioning on Google for
relatively low difficulty keywords and, even then, only with their HomePage.
GlobeTek Inc.
Timothy R. Srobenhorst
President
(920) 819-7199
Timothy@freeonlinewebsitedesign.org
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