Pagerank and SERP Position

Lot of us get confused with Pagerank and SERP position. We are not sure whether we need to have good pagerank for good SERP or whether pagerank is still important. We need to have a clear understanding of these two concepts whether we hire a company to optimize our website or we do it ourselves. Only when we know what pagerank and SERP position mean we will know what we are paying for when we hire an SEO company.

SERP stands for Search Engine Results Page. This is the page in which search engine results are displayed when someone makes a search. These results depend on a number of factors including pagerank. Pagerank is specific to Google specific; Google rates all the websites and it ranks them based on their importance as per its algorithm. There are different views about pagerank some webmasters say that pagerank is of not importance as long as you get top position in the search results page. Whereas, some webmasters spend all their energy in increasing their pagerank.

There are cases where you can see a website getting listed within the top ten or twenty results irrespective of the pagerank. Sometimes even web pages that have good pagerank may not be listed in the top position where sites without any pagerank are listed. This indicates that pagerank does not decide your position in the search results page. The significance of pagerank comes when there is a huge competition. If you do not work on your pagerank then your competitor who has put in a lot of efforts to increase their pagerank may takeover your top positions.

We need to understand that pagerank is not directly equivalent to search rankings. The pagerank of the website is not revisited by Google as frequently as the SERP position. The SERP position keeps changing very frequently unlike the pagerank which takes at least 3 months before it is updated. Your position in SERP is based on many other factors including the relevancy of the content, its freshness and the keyword density etc., besides the pagerank.

Pagerank is almost directly linked with the number of inbound links that point to a website. When these links are also contextual links then the value of those links increase. So we can safely assume that greater the number of inbound links better the pagerank. Inbound links also have a significant role to play in SERP positioning. A page with highest number of inbound links is more likely to get listed on top whenever there is a stiff competition. Search engines use the strength of inbound links to decide about the website’s importance.

Ultimately what everyone is looking for is good website traffic; if you have good position in SERP then be happy but make sure that you hold on to your top position for ever because you can lose the position at anytime. So do everything that is possible within your limits to retain your position. At the same time don’t ignore the pagerank; you will only benefit from good pagerank and it can do no harm to you so make sure that you are in a better position to combat your competition.

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