Although many marketers have dismissed Google PageRank as a dead metric – and even though it’s been removed by the tech giant themselves – does it still count?
As the world’s biggest search engine, it’s almost understandable why the big wigs over at Google have made some pretty significant changes over the years as to how the tech giant essentially operates on a day to day basis. In saying that, the concept has remained relatively simple – give the people what they want via delivering the right results.
However, exactly how Google manages to deliver the right results is what tends to leave even the most savvy of digital marketers scratching their heads. The criteria that the search engine demands seems to be ever changing, with factors such as Google EAT and Google Page Experience being just a handful of the known hoops that marketers have to jump through.
When one of the earlier benchmarks known as Google PageRank was rolled back and eventually retired in 2016, many trying to do business while navigating the search engine all but breathed a sigh of relief – but what was it, and is it really gone for good?
The Origins Of Google PageRank
One of the very first algorithms that the search engine rolled out was Google PageRank. Essentially, it worked as a mathematical formula that judged the ‘value of a page’ by looking at the quantity and quality of other pages that link to it. It’s hard to remember the internet in its early days, but Google co-founders Sergey Brin and Larry Page first devised Google PageRank all the way back in 1997 while they were conducting a research project at Stanford University.
Dissatisfied with the current search engines in use at the time, the duo hatched a plan to create their own as a means to improve the results delivered, and based their framework around the same ideology that scientists used to gage the ‘importance’ of published papers – by judging how many other scientists backed the papers up, or vouched for them.
While Google PageRank is a very complex concept, it was essentially a mathematical formula used to score the value of a webpage. The formula was designed to consider the number of inbound links, external links, and the ‘page rank’ of those links to determine a website’s overall authority. The formula would then create a score, using a logarithmic scale with values ranging from 0-10. In a nutshell, the higher the Google PageRank score of a page, the more authoritative that page is, and the higher up the list it goes when the search engine delivers results to user queries.
By tracking references between web pages – which are now otherwise known as backlinks – the foundations used for Google PageRank still play a wildly important role in how the search engine works, even if it is now known by different names. While there are over two hundred known Google ranking factors, PageRank might be ‘retired’, but it’s legacy lives on through the importance of using both internal and external links on your blogs, articles and overall website.
As the world continues to rapidly shift online, trying to do business in this highly competitive space is a whole new ball game when compared to other traditional methods of trading. As a result, getting seen online via Google involves much more than having a slick website, and in this day and age, businesses simply need clear, consistent and on brand content like blogs, videos and graphics in order to reach the top of the search engine results.
While it’s certainly not an easy task if you don’t know what you’re doing, the good news is that outsourcing your brand’s content marketing needs and giving your website traffic a boost is actually easier than you might think.
The Key To Good Marketing Is Great Content
Producing quality, consistent and on brand content that’s Google friendly takes time, effort, experience and resources – and you’re not alone if you can’t quite commit to that. Avoiding the use of content marketing altogether may actually be doing your brand a disservice, but thankfully – investing in a solid strategy has never been easier.
Here at Content Hive, producing top quality digital content is exactly what we do best. We have itemised a list of digital content services, and allocated credits next to each of these. This means that each month, you can use your credits with us to produce digital content such as social media posts, blog articles, videos and even animated Instagram stories.
We believe that this model means we can produce high quality content in faster than normal delivery times. It also means that because you have a monthly credit, you are going to want to make sure you use these up – and so do we – meaning that your digital content is always consistent.
If you aren’t quite sure where to start on your digital marketing journey and would like to speak to a professional, why not book a free discovery call with us at Content Hive today to discuss how we can get your brand buzzing online.
