Being a webmaster (and this applies for bloggers too) can be a tough chore.
No kidding.
It takes lots of experience and SEO knowledge to constantly keep your site at the top of the SERPs, or to get them there. And it takes constant work.
The craze for links and more links would not have been so important today, had it not been for something called PageRank, upon which Google’s proprietory algorithm is built upon. The theory goes that the more “votes” you get from other sites, that means the more “popular” your site is. So Google is obligated to place your site higher up the search results to comply with the election votes. It is then believed that PageRank will influence a sites traffic based on its higher listing in the SERPs.
That above was the theory in brief….
Then why did a page from my little hobby website that was hosted for free, stay on the front page for a particular keyword, for a very long time? I believe it was between 1-2 years at the tops. Everytime I checked, it would be sitting there at number 3-8 out of over 3,000,000 results for a particular keyword. Month after month.
I have no idea why, when it :
- has only a PageRank 2
- has no backlinks. I never built any and I never saw any, with any SEO tools.
I created the website for fun back when I was studying and after the website was done, I never bothered with it again. This was no website earning revenue; there was no advertising, and no marketing of any kind. Could that have played a part? It was a thrill to see my simple hobby site listed in Google, when I searched for it. I didn’t even know the significance of being on the front page of the search results, just glad I “was listed”. Only when I learnt about PageRank and SERPs last year, did I realize the significance.
It’s not every day you get to beat out 3 million plus pages with a certain keyword, especially since many of these were high PageRank sites. Many were .gov and .edu sites (typically with PageRanks of 6-8). Neither did I know anything about SEO, keywords, LSI, links, PageRank, etc, back then. Right through so many Google updates. The funny thing was, even Yahoo gave me a brief moment of fame at the top of the pile when I last checked 6 months ago (it’s no longer there).
Till today, it’s an utter mystery for me. The most recent Google update has blanked out my little website out of the top. It’s not even in the top ten pages anymore. *Sigh*
Did Google finally decide that my little website with zero backlinks and PageRank 2 shouldn’t deserve to be there any more? I wonder.
If previously my site was tops without any effort, no updating, no backlinks; it proves that Google does give respect to original, honest, and enthusiastically done “mom and pop” websites. That Google can be fair to the little guy with his little website.
But maybe that is just what we all would like to think. Nobody knows Google except the top few people that run/own Google. Anyway, after being at the top for so many months, I think Google has decided to give the other high PageRanked/deep pocketed corporations/organizations a chance to shine? 🙂
So, does PageRank really matter? That’s the question in flux.