Design, Coding, SEO and Social Media Marketing, WordPress & Facebook

I’ve been a student and practitioner of Search Engine Optimization – SEO – for a number of years. And I have to admit that the Great SEO Pastime of trying to figure out Google’s search algorithm is both frustrating and endlessly fascinating, like reading a Thomas Pynchon novel.

As we know, PageRank (“PR”) – the metric Google uses to assess a Web page’s “popularity” – was the central innovation of Larry Page (where apparently the name comes from) and Sergey Brin when they were at Stanford back in the 1990s. It was at the time a very effective way to assess the relevance of a page by measuring how many other Web pages linked to that page, the content of the linked text (the “anchor text”), and the PageRank/popularity of the linking page. More recently, it is thought that the “theme” of the linking page and its relevance to the theme of the page linked to is also a factor in assessing PageRank.

Of course, all of this is surmised, as Google protects the secrets of its search algorithms as ferociously as Thomas Pynchon protects his privacy.

From Google’s “Corporate Information > Technology Overview”:

We use more than 200 signals, including our patented PageRank™ algorithm, to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important. We then conduct hypertext-matching analysis to determine which pages are relevant to the specific search being conducted. By combining overall importance and query-specific relevance, we’re able to put the most relevant and reliable results first.

PageRank Technology: PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.

SEOs are increasingly speculating that the importance of PageRank – although still an obsession with many SEOs – has diminished as Google has evolved its algorithm and, it is suspected, begun giving increasing weight to other factors besides PageRank, to some of those other “200 signals.”

One factor that it seems apparent has become more dominant, from my own research, is what is called “theme relevance,” which would be Google’s evaluation not only of the number of backlinks (links from external sites) a website has, or how “popular” the linking sites are, but how thematically relevant to the linked-to site the linking site is.

Thus, if a site that is about Hawaiian vacation rentals has 14,000 inbound links, but from websites that have nothing to do with Hawaii or vacations or rentals, then a similarly themed site with, say, 1,500 links from websites about Hawaii, vacations or rentals may very well out rank the more “popular” site.

Recently, we have been working on improving the rankings for some Hawaiian-vacation-rental themed Web pages, and our on-page SEO has been sufficiently solid to get us to page 1 of Google’s SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages) for a number of relevant keywords. However, we’ve been kept from the top of page 1 by a number of pages that have a lower PageRank than our page, and until recently it was a mystery as to why they were ranking to high.

In particular, in a search on “maui vacation rentals” (without quotes), this page – with a PR of “0″ -  is at the #1 position: http://www.hawaiianbeachrentals.com/Hawaii/Maui/rentals1.htm.

All the pages below it have higher PageRank.

What distinguishes this page from the others is that it has, according to my SeoQuake Firefox plug-in, 9110 indexed pages. OK. And the domain’s age, considered another of the more important “signals” Google measures, is about 6.5 years which is not bad.

But it gets more interesting…

Analyzing the title and meta description tags, we see nothing that great:

title: Maui vacation rentals,vacation homes,villas,beach rentals,house rental and beach houses on Maui.

By SEO best practices, perhaps a bit wordy and redundant.

meta description:
The largest collection of vacation rentals on Maui. Our local expert staff can help you book the perfect place to call home on Maui.

Again, by SEO best practices, perhaps a bit wordy and flaunting the principles of “priority” (high-value keywords should be as close as possible to the beginning of a title tag, meta tag, header) and “proximity” (if you’re optimizing for “maui vacation rentals” the, all else being equal, a page with “Maui vacation rentals” included will rank higher than “vacation rentals in Maui”).

To me, when viewing the page, the most salient feature was the preponderance of internal links to other pages, with keyword-relevant anchor text. There are around 90 such links on the page. There is only one HTML header tag, an <h1> tag around the phrase “Maui vacation rentals.”

At this point I was stumped. How was this page, with a PR of “0″, beating out all the competition.

So I turned to HubSpot’s informative Website Grader, entered in “www.HawaiianBeachRentals.com” and was surprised to see the site had a score of 98.5! One of the highest I’d seen. And the results indicated a PR of “2″!

For the specific page I was researching, the results were a score of 91 and, as indicated with SeoQuake, a PR of “0″.

Even more enlightening was the total indicated for inbound links (backlinks): 1,032. However, although this is a fairly low number of backlinks for a page to rank #1 for such a competitive term, I decided to use Google’s link:www.hawaiianbeachrentals.com/Hawaii/Maui/rentals1.htm search (which returns a sampling of inbound links but not anywhere near a total. I find it useful in seeing what sort of backlinks a site is getting.)  to see what sorts of sites were linking back to the www.HawaiianBeachRentals.com site.

Well, it turns out that although it returned 129 links, most of these linked sites had themes that were in the Hawaiian vacations rentals space.

I have, for the moment concluded that a Web page can have a relatively low number of backlinks and a low PR, but if the linking sites are strongly relevant to the linked site, this can overcome other factors (“signals”) where the site doesn’t do as well as others.

Other Factors to Investigate

In a spot check of some of the backlinking sites, it appears that the owner of the HawaiianBeachRentals.com Web property may have a number of other properties, separate domains where he builds links back to his site. Check out the links back to the HBR.com site at the bottom of this Web page.

With over 1,000 backlinks, this Web page should have a PR higher than “0″. The fact that the website has over 9,000 indexed pages, all interlinking between them, doesn’t jibe with the page having such a low PR.

I would very much welcome others’ input into this. Consider it, natch, an Open Investigation.

Resources I found useful…

SEOmoz.org’s excellent assessment of Google’s Ranking Factors (2007)

Google’s New SEO Rules – the “Allegra” Update (2007)

Google’s Technology Overview

Google PageRank FAQ