The Dirt on Professional SEO Services and Page Rank: Four Major Misconceptions

Let’s clear up a few misconceptions that your professional SEO services may not have explained about PageRank (PR):

#1:  PageRank is the ranking on Google’s search engine.
It isn’t. Simply put, PR is an indication of how important one page is to the Web.  Google decides this by calculating the quality and relevance of the links to and from your page.

Before you go yelling to the company that provided your professional SEO services, understand that this doesn’t mean that PageRank isn’t important.  It is – just not in the way you may have thought.  PR is one of the main tools Google uses to decide your page ranking on the search engine; with the creation and use of Latent Semantic Indexing (LSI), PageRank may become even more important.

#2:  PageRank provides ranking for your whole website.
It doesn’t. For that matter, the Google search engine doesn’t rank your entire website, either – one of the many reasons landing pages and site maps are such good tools to use.  While some professional SEO services proclaim that they can raise your website’s ranking, in reality, PageRank and Google’s search engine both deal with only one page at a time.

#3:  The more links you have, the higher your PageRank.
This isn’t necessarily true. Professional SEO services aren’t lying to you; it’s possible to raise your PR with a large number of links.  However, a high amount won’t mean anything if the sites you’re linking to have low PR values.  This is pointed out especially well in the case of websites that only have a few links, but the linked pages are relevant, high quality and have a high PR value.

#4:  Any link is a good link.
Not true and believing this can actually damage your PR. Google decides PR by “votes”.  When someone links to your page, it’s a positive vote.  However, Google also takes into account that page’s PR; the higher the PR, the more that page’s vote counts.

That goes for pages you link to, also.  Some professional SEO services don’t pay attention to the PR of those pages, when they most definitely should.  An outgoing link from your page to a PR0 page can very well get you penalized.  Link farms are a bad idea because of this; Google either ignores the links or penalizes you for them.

If this system seems unfair, look at it this way: If a hospital were trying to decide the best way to perform a surgery procedure, whose opinion should count more – the surgeon’s or the janitor’s?  Would you have that surgery if you knew a janitor decided how it was done?

While PageRank is important, be wary of the SEO providers that shout it.  Ask the companies how they would raise your PR.  Make sure their professional SEO services include a comprehensive layout of the campaign strategy, and keep in mind that the bottom line isn’t, “How do I raise my PR?“, but “How do I get more conversions?“

Tagged as: PageRank, professional SEO services, SEO services