Google PageRank has been surrounded by so much hype and there is so much confusion about it, that we thought it would be helpful to write an article that would dispel some of the myths.

Myth #1: PageRank carries a huge role in the SERP positioning

Matt Cutts, head of the Webspam department at Google and also one of their top notch engineers said in an interview back in 2005:

Google uses many factors in ranking. Of these, the PageRank algorithm might be the best known. PageRank evaluates two things: how many links there are to a web page from other pages, and the quality of the linking sites. With PageRank, five or six high-quality links from websites such as www.cnn.com and www.nytimes.com would be valued much more highly than twice as many links from less reputable or established sites.  But we use many factors besides PageRank.

(Via Google Librarian Center)

Long story short, while the PR does carry some role towards the ranking, it shouldn’t be considered of the utmost importance. Focus on building relevant links and you may find that a PR1 page ranks better than a PR3.

Myth #2: PageRank raises arithmetically

False. The answer lies in Matt’s statement above: two links from reputable websites can be worth more than twice as many from unknown or irrelevant sites. You could get a PR7 from either a handful of PR6 links or a couple of thousands of PR3’s. While the algorithm Google uses to calculate PageRank is not fully disclosed, trial and error research has shown that you need far more links to get from PR3 to PR4 than from PR2 to PR3.

Myth #3: No one knows how Google computes the PR of a page

Again, the statement is somewhat false. While some of the factors are kept confidential, the formula used to assess the PageRank of a site is something in the line of

PR(A) = (1-d) + d ( PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn) )

where

• • A is the website in question
  • t1, t2, …, tn are websites that link to your page
  • C(t1), C(t2), …, C(tn) are the number of outgoing links from each of the n pages
  • d is a “dampening factor” that dilutes the power of links coming to your site. d is known to be in the 80%-85% range.

In other words, the PR of your page is made up of  the PageRanks of each URL linking to you divided by the number of outbound links, summed up and multiplied by a subunit factor.

Myth #4: My site will lose PR if I link to other sites

False. As you can see from the formula above, the PageRank is a sum of positive elements and only depends on the amount of sites who link to you. Existing PR could drop if

• Existing links on websites are removed. If you lose some PR(t)/C(t) terms from the formula above, the resulting sum will naturally be lower than the original one.
• More links appear on existing pages. If PR(t) stays constant and C(t) increases, then PR(t)/C(t) will drop.
• Existing links lose PR. It goes without saying that if you had a link on a PR5 site that went down to PR3 at the next update, your Pagerank might suffer.