The Serious/Not Serious Series on Jargon
YOU CANNOT BE SERIOUS:
Yo bro.
To get by in the hood, you need street cred. In the web hood, street cred is called PageRank.
To get the top street cred in the hood you gotta be connected. You gotta be connected to names – big mo-fo names, like Google and Apple. You’ve gotta run with the big dogs, the bigger the better, and the more the better too. When you connected with a big gang of bad-ass dudes, you get respect and cred.
Street cred goes from 10 down to 0. To get a “10” you gotta be Google, Bo Derek, or Superman, but “3” is common enough for the average brother in the web hood. Nerds get a great big zero, but there is a “N/A” for kids – who ain’t got their cred assessed yet. (The Google-man’s a busy guy, and assesses every crib in the web-hood every three months or so).
To make sales, you gotta make a connection with a user. The user puts out the enquiry with the Google-man, specifying what kinda shit he wants. Google-man acks all the brothers who can supply what the man needs. If a brother can supply, his name goes on his list, then he sorts the list, and the brothers with the biggest cred cahoonies get their names top of the list.
Then the Google-man gives the list to the user.
SERIOUSLY:
PageRank is Google’s way of determining the importance of a webpage or website. A website’s PageRank influences where that site will appear in search results for relevant terms. It can influence the amount of organic (unpaid) traffic that comes to your site from the search engine. It can also influence and inform potential advertisers, partners and others interested in your site. They often check out your PageRank to see what Google thinks of your site before doing business with you.
Google’s view is that if another site links to your webpage, that site is saying that it likes you. Google builds up a picture of your website’s likeability by examining who is linking to your site, how important the linker is and by looking at the context of the link. Not all links are equal and not all links are counted by Google. PageRank Values range from PR0 to PR10.
Google watches out for websites that try to manipulate rankings so it’s not a good idea to engage in dodgy SEO (Search Engine Optimization) practices in an attempt to increase your PageRank. The complete magic recipe for calculating PageRank is known only to Google and the big “G” works on this recipe (algorithm) all the time.
Probably the best way to improve your website’s PageRank is to ignore it. Concentrate instead on improving the User Experience, creating great content, and building relationships online. A good PageRank will follow. Pay attention to this extract from the Blog of Matt Cutts (who happens to be Head of the Webspam Team at Google):
“….A lot of bad SEO happens because people say “I’ll force my way to the top of Google first, and then everyone will find out about my site.” Putting rankings before the creation of a great site is in many ways putting the cart before the horse. Often the search rankings follow from the fact that you’re getting to be well-known on the web completely outside the sphere of search…. By chasing a great user experience above search rankings, many sites turn out to be what search engines would want to return anyway.”*
Remember that PageRank is a Google thing. If you’re building a business online, don’t obsess about Google all the time. Organic search engine traffic is great but look for other ways to bring visitors to your site. Don’t let your business model become solely dependent on Google. For long-term viability try to think beyond the big “G”. There’s an insightful post in the archives at DoshDosh.com which gives lots of food for thought about why PageRank may be overrated.
What do you think? Do you think your business model is overly-dependent on Google? If so, are you thinking about taking steps to deal with this?
*This quote is buried deep in the Comments section of the particular blog post. We’ve extracted it to make your life easier but read the entire blog post (including comments) if you have the energy and inclination.
Footnote: The information in this series is stuff that we’ve picked up along the way when setting up The Wittery. We don’t claim to be experts but we’re happy to share what we’ve learned. The stuff in the “You Cannot Be Serious” section comes straight from the noggins of witty writer members at The Wittery.
Other Jargon Buster Articles:
Attraction Marketing; Buzz Marketing; Content Strategy; Duplicate Content; Linkerati; SEO; SERPS; The Cloud; User Experience
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