PageRank vs. Search Result Ranking

There are misunderstanding of Google PageRank (PR), so I came with this post for you to understand how PageRank of Google works under the hood and what role it plays in influencing rankings.

PageRank

Many blogger's and webmaster obsess and over hype the importance of Google PageRank.

There are PR = 8 websites that you never find in Google search result unless you search for them by company name, while there are PR = 0 sites that are in the top 2 or 3 results for relevent keywords phrase.

People tend to confuse PageRank with their page's ranking for certain search result for a certain keyword. PR or PageRank is just one factor that is used to determined your page's actual rank on a search results page for a given search query.

It is not uncommon to see a page with a lower PageRank that is positioned higher on a search results page that a page with a higher PageRank. This shows that PageRank is not the most important factor in Google's ranking algorithm. A properly keyword - optimized page with a lower PageRank can outrank a non-optimized page with a higher PageRank.

This is a common scenario for large corporate sites. The corporate site may have a high PageRank as a result of the large number of other business partner sites that link to it, but they may end up being outranked due to their lack of keyword optimization for their pages. But social media site comes differ.