Google PageRank, Simplified: A Guide for SEO Beginners via @beanstalkim
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Google PageRank, Simplified: A Guide for SEO Beginners
There was once a time when there was no SEO metric more important than PageRank.
You could buy it.
You could sell it.
And that was the problem Google created for themselves when they gave us pesky marketers the green bar.
It was called toolbar PageRank.
And it broke Google.
We'll get into that a bit further below.
But first, let's go back even further.
The Origins of a Search Engine
In 1996, Sergey Brin and Larry Page, together with some other academics at Stanford who likely regret not getting more heavily involved with what it became, developed and patented the system that would be trademarked as PageRank.
The patent for the system was granted to Stanford, and Brin and Page gave up shares in Google for exclusive rights to it.
Shares that sold just 9 years later for over $300 million.
But what made this patent so valuable?
What was PageRank?
PageRank Revolutionized Search
In simplest terms, PageRank brought links into the ranking equation.
It's easy to see where the idea came from.
You have a group of academics sitting around doing research.
They're following citations in papers and noticing that the more times a paper is referenced by other papers, the more relevant and important it seems to be.
Bingo!
You have the foundation for link-based search algorithms.
I can also fully understand the frustration they were solving.
I first attempted to work on the internet in 1994 (about the time the idea would have been occurring to the paper's authors).
I was doing some research for a poli sci paper I was writing at the university computer lab.
The search engine was Yahoo.
And I was miserable.
I remember having seen a show on chat rooms and attempted to find one where I could get some direction on where to find what I was