SocialRank is the New PageRank – Here’s How it Works
The Late 90’s:
Back in the late 90’s, when search engines like Excite, Altavista, Hotbot and Lycos ruled the world, search results were determined only by relevancy.The more keywords on your page that matched the query, the higher your page would rank.
Then Google flipped the search world upside down with its notion of PageRank. The link based popularity metric that introduced the concept of authority + relevancy as its ranking mode.
PageRank Rules the Day:
Google was 100% right in thinking that authority, or credibility, should be a ranking factor, the problem was that Google had no way of telling how authoritative the author of the page really was. In fact, in most cases they couldn’t even tell “Who” the author of the page was. The best they could do was to look at what other domains linked to them and from that try to calculate a popularity score – PageRank.
It’s Not Perfect:
PageRank has its flaws. One being that it doesn’t take into consideration the credibility of the author of the content. If PageRank is a measure of authority and creditability, it shouldn’t be. The unfortunate result is that articles on popular domains usually outrank better articles on less popular domains, even if a less popular domain article is written by a more authoritative individual.
Time Flies:
It’s been over 10 years since the original PageRank was introduced, and since then Google has made many improvements to its ranking algorithm.
Google recently announced that they are beginning to support authorship markup to inform search engines who the author is of an article or piece of content. This is done adding a special link from the page you wrote content on to your author page on the website or Google+ Profile.
Written by <a rel=”author” href=”https://profiles.google.com/109412257237874861202″>Matt Cutts</a>
Notice the rel=”author” attribute in the link? That tells Google that this content should be credited to you, but that is only half of what needs to be done. You then need to add a link back from the author’s page to the content. This reciprocal linking arrangement confirms to Google that you are indeed the author of the content.
SocialRank:
We’ve now entered into a time when Google can finally connect content with authorship. Not just that, but by looking at the type of content one creates, share sand engages with, Google has a solid understand of the types of topics that they are, more or less, an authority in.
Even more importantly, Google+ helps Google understand the social graph around an individual. If I’m placed in circles with a dozen other high profile SEO’s, that should be an authority signal Google can use to help tag me as an authority on the topic of SEO. It’s very similar to the concept of link neighborhoods where the types of websites who link to you help determine the quality of your own website in the eyes of Google.
In my next post I’ll show you how to optimize your SocialRank.
Comments
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I agree that PageRank is an important signal in the Google positioning algorithm. It is, however, the HomePage PageRank and not the PageRank of the page that matters.
