Online Media Cultist

There’s a great article by Andy Beard and fascinating subsequent conversation between Beard and TechMeme founder Gabe Rivera here.

In short, Beard discovered that TechMeme’s Google PageRank had mysteriously dropped from a 6 or 7 to a 4 in a short period of time. Mysterious is the word, by the way, as TechMeme has always been and continues to be a high quality aggregator of tech news conversations and there is seemingly no reason for Google to hammer it in its search listings in such a significant and terrifying way.

I say significant because if any person on the planet started a new blog on Blogger right now, you’d get assigned a PR 4 in all likelihood. And I say terrifying because when Google hammers your relative search rank, it has the potential to cripple your business and there’s normally very little you can do about it aside from praying, hoping, and tweaking your page content and then praying/hoping that a month or two or three in the future your ranking will be magically restored.

If any of this interests you in the slightest – and it should if you’re a web publisher, interested in search, or wonder how people on the Internet end up driving traffic and making money – head over and check out Andy’s post and its comments.

Wikipedia defines PageRank as: “a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of “measuring” its relative importance within the set.”

Google’s mysterious and fiercely guarded PageRank system is the stuff of web publisher dreams and nightmares. A PageRank jump from 6 to 7 can bring in untold thousands of daily search engine traffic visitors, for instance. All based upon Google’s cyclical and algorithmic assessment of web page influence, based upon factors such as incoming links, outbound links (and the influence or relative importance of both), web page design, whether or not you seem to produce high quality content or are an unrepentant spammer, and on and on.

But is it so important? Of late Google luminaries such as Matt Cutts have been downplaying the importance of PageRank in how it ranks webpages.

If you’re up for a pretty intense breakdown and analysis, check out this beauty.

Warning: it says stuff like:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn))

Enjoy!