Who Cares About Page Rank? Google PageRank Trends
When people talk about "rank" in relation to the Internet, they are usually talking about how their sites rank in the SERPs - shorthand for Search Engine Results Pages. With Google driving approximately half of the search traffic on the Internet and drawing the majority of intended searches, webmasters the world over tend to obsess over how their site ranks in Google. While Google's algorithms for creating results is proprietary, it widely assumed that the PageRank Google computes for any given page on the site has something to do with the results. Not everything, not always a lot, but something.
When Google introduced their new trends reports this week, I initially spent a lot of time looking are publishing industry phrases and words that produced patterns like an oscilloscope trace. Today, with the advent of my new blog, I decided to investigate the trend in PageRank, as Google spells it, and Page Rank, as those of us who have trouble typing run-on words spell it.
The interest in PageRank has clearly been on the rise over the last couple years, more or less doubling. The top five countries interested in Page Rank were: India, Poland, Russia, Romania and the Czech Republic. The top five countries interested in PageRank were: Czech Republic, Germany, Poland, Norway and Hungary. Norway? I would have though they were all too busy with North Sea oil revenues to be fooling around with the Internet economy. English was only the 9th most popular language to search for PageRank, and the 5th most popular for Page Rank, which at least confirms my guess that it's natural English speakers who are more likely to render the concept in natural English.
The problem with the language and regional results is that I don't understand what Google means by "normalized." Are the results shown being normalized to the total number of queries being generated in a region? Maybe all it means is that a higher proportion of people in the Czech Republic are interested in web search, not a higher absolute number. The only thing that really surprised me is that the news media always got the spelling right, as shown by the new interest graph, which only shows a blue line.
So, who cares about PageRank? People who are trying to make a living on the Internet by attracting search engine traffic to their products or to the advertising they host. At the organic SERP critique session at the Boston Webmaster World conference I attended last month, it was openly demonstrated that clean-cut business men and women will beg, borrow or steal for rank.
When Google introduced their new trends reports this week, I initially spent a lot of time looking are publishing industry phrases and words that produced patterns like an oscilloscope trace. Today, with the advent of my new blog, I decided to investigate the trend in PageRank, as Google spells it, and Page Rank, as those of us who have trouble typing run-on words spell it.
The interest in PageRank has clearly been on the rise over the last couple years, more or less doubling. The top five countries interested in Page Rank were: India, Poland, Russia, Romania and the Czech Republic. The top five countries interested in PageRank were: Czech Republic, Germany, Poland, Norway and Hungary. Norway? I would have though they were all too busy with North Sea oil revenues to be fooling around with the Internet economy. English was only the 9th most popular language to search for PageRank, and the 5th most popular for Page Rank, which at least confirms my guess that it's natural English speakers who are more likely to render the concept in natural English.
The problem with the language and regional results is that I don't understand what Google means by "normalized." Are the results shown being normalized to the total number of queries being generated in a region? Maybe all it means is that a higher proportion of people in the Czech Republic are interested in web search, not a higher absolute number. The only thing that really surprised me is that the news media always got the spelling right, as shown by the new interest graph, which only shows a blue line.
So, who cares about PageRank? People who are trying to make a living on the Internet by attracting search engine traffic to their products or to the advertising they host. At the organic SERP critique session at the Boston Webmaster World conference I attended last month, it was openly demonstrated that clean-cut business men and women will beg, borrow or steal for rank.
Links to this post:
Create a Link
<< Home