Inside VT KnowledgeWorks: AttaainCI Reports PageRank

Daryl Scott, founder of VT KnowledgeWorks member company Attaain, Inc. and creator of competitive intelligence software AttaainCI, and I have a continuing discussion about how links from blog mentions can help a company’s search engine performance and influence its search engine PageRank. In a recent e-mail, he explained the PageRank/linking concept a bit further, and I’d like to share some of that discussion.

Hi Anne:

Per our discussion, here is a bit more info related to the PageRank and linking discussion that we had…

Google uses a complex system to determine PageRank defined simply by Google as our view of the importance of web pages. This importance is determined partially by the quantity and quality of links leading to a site.

One other phrase Google uses to describe the whole PageRank/linking aspect is “shared reputation,” i.e. when a highly ranked site or blog links to you, it is in essence “sharing its reputation” with your site, and therefore drives up the reputation of your own site. Kind of an interesting way to think about it, as well, and the implication is that getting links from low ranked/“poor reputation” sites doesn't really help you - something that people often overlook in the quest to get links into their sites.

Like website meta tags, Google PageRank is sometimes thought to be a bit irrelevant – and for some applications it is. However, a quick comparison of Google PageRanks can still provide some initial indicators about newly discovered competitive sites, since it really is just a reflection of many other individual factors (site traffic, number/quality of inbound links, domain age, etc.). And while PageRank may not have much influence on “long-tail searches” (i.e. very specific and detailed search queries), in some cases it can still have relevance in Search Engine Rank Position (SERP)for more generic “short-tail searches.” So, when used carefully, website owners can still extract some useful insights from understanding their PageRank relative to competitors, which is why we report the Google PageRank for every website researched/tracked in AttaainCI.

We actually have a new series of videos available on our website that demonstrates a few of the different analyses in AttaainCI that include PageRank. In particular, the Researching Companies in AttaainCI video shows several places where PageRank is reported. It also shows how you can use AttaainCI to analyze a competitive website’s inbound/outbound links to understand more about their link quality, sources and the potential for expanding the linking for your own site.

Best Regards,