Why PageRank loves blogs

The secret is out. Google (and other) search engines love blogs. But why this blog love?

It’s true that most blogging systems are Search Engine friendly. For example many blog systems like Blogger and Wordpress allows for blog posts’ titles to be inserted in the post URL AND in the web page’s title tag. Dynamic titles is just one important factor that enhances Search Engine Results Pages (SERPs).

But there is another more important reason why blogs rank high in SERPs. And that is down to the pioneering way Google decided to calculate the relative importance of web ‘properties’.

The key decision was to ignore websites and use web pages as the basic unit for calculating ranking value.

The republic of PageRank

Google called this method PageRank. Note that Google did not call it domain rank or site rank. And indeed, if two pages are on the same domain but not linked via hyper links, they will have no influence on each other’s rank.

All pages on the web are in theory born equal when Google assigns them their initial value.

The Page Rank algorithm actually looks like this:

PR(U) = (1-d) + d * sumV(PR(V)/N(V)).

Where PR = Page Rank, U is the page, d is a damping factor and V is a page that links to our U page.

Google describes it thus:

‘PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.’

In essence, all web pages are in a popularity contest and this contest involves winning the battle for links from other pages and in particular other popular pages.

PageRank favours blogs

And this explains why blogs do well in SERPs. Blogs tend to have many pages.

SSW explains the significance of Page Rank for blogs:

‘Creating more pages is the only way to create page rank from nothing, as every page on your site starts it’s life with the same base page rank as did every other page on the web. It follows from this that having more pages is better, and having excessively long pages is a waste – you would end up with more page rank to distribute if you split it into two pages instead.’

So writing blog posts ads PageRank value, because it creates pages. These pages normally link to those around them and so transfers its value to its neighbors. They almost always link to the blog front page. The result? Your blog front page climbs in rankings if you keep posting, even if no other external sites link to it.

So we can trick Google by posting posting posting?

So why do web masters not just create blogs and publish hundreds of pages, so inflating its PageRank?

Bear in mind that PageRank is not the only factor involved in a search. Google completes the following steps when you perform a search:

1. Finds all pages matching the keywords of the search;
2. Ranks them according to “on the page” factors (proximity between keywords, the frequency they occur, repetition of keywords etc);
3. Calculate the relevancy of inbound links;
4. Uses the PageRank to decide what order to display the results in;

So if you don’t get the first 3 right, just publishing empty or meaningless pages will ineffective. ZuluZulu will deal with the implications of these in a next post.