Search Engine Placement

Yes, folks….it’s that time again. Google has updated the visible PageRank (PR) over the weekend and just in time for Halloween!

What’s does PR have to do with Halloween? Absolutely nothing. What does PR have to do with your search engine placement? Well, a fair amount.

Google PageRank measures a website’s link popularity (the number and quality of backlinks it has) on a scale of 0 to 10. A strong link popularity generally equates to trust from Google (and other search engines) and therefore increased search engine placement as well. There are still some people that interpret PageRank as “the holy grail” of search engine optimization but it seems to have been devalued over the years. Don’t get me wrong…there is still a strong connection between link popularity and search engine placement, but there is a bit of a disconnect between the visible PageRank and search engine rankings.

Many website owners have tried to capitalize on PageRank by buying and selling links based strictly on the PR of the referring website. This is against Google’s Webmaster Guidlines and could potentially get both websites penalized if paid links are detected.