As if explaining SEO to those unfamiliar with it isn’t hard enough,  Steve Rubel published an article in Adage complicating things even more and misinforming the mass media.  This action encourages the continued proliferation of misinformation by traditional agencies as many try to play in a space in which they are not equipped.

Every SEO expert out there would agree with me when I say Google’s PageRank is not the best way to rate online influence. And what exactly is Mr. Rubel referring to when he says “online influence”? Not to mention that there are an infinite number of ways categorize online influence, be it links, content, subject, history of site, bookmarks, etc.

Many discussions on Webmaster World and from Google themselves have been discussing for the past few years whether to remove PageRank from the toolbar and most recently they will start to pull back it’s presence with new toolbar releases.  The toolbar Pagerank is separate from the Pagerank number that Google incorporates into its search algorithm.  So the number we see has very little to do with rankings at all. It is merely a metric by which the uninformed will be unnecessarily impressed.

I’m not going to argue for or against what PageRank really is because there is no argument. PageRank is useless as two commenters on the original post would agree.  Additionally, I can’t believe that this article would have been posted as a linkbait mechanism because AdAge also chose to publish it in their print addition which is where I first read the article.

My real reason for responding to this article is to disperse any rumors out there and to let people know they should really check their sources and the facts before publishing anything SEO related. Just because you use the Internet doesn’t mean you are an expert on SEO.

“We opened our Phoenix office in 2006 and hoped that it would develop to support many of our internal engineering projects, the systems that make Google, well, Google. But we’ve found that despite everyone’s best efforts, the projects our engineers have been working on in Arizona have been, and remain, highly fragmented. So after a lot of soul searching we have decided to incorporate work on these projects into teams elsewhere at Google. We will therefore be closing our Arizona office on November 21, 2008.”

Read the full post here.

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Next time you ask your Internet Marketing company to to rank #1 for a particular keyword, think about this – 1,000,000,000,000 unique URLs are out there – of course probably not all competing with you but you can bet on a few million or hundred thousand.  These aren’t even all the pages that Google indexes.  The Internet is infinite – a scary thought.  A universe of it’s own, more than an information superhighway I believe we have now entered space.
In 1998, Google first indexed 26 million pages. They’ve come along way since then, and the number of individual web pages [Googles says] is growing by several billion pages per day.

“Today, Google downloads the web continuously, collecting updated page information and re-processing the entire web-link graph several times per day. This graph of one trillion URLs is similar to a map made up of one trillion intersections. So multiple times every day, we do the computational equivalent of fully exploring every intersection of every road in the United States. Except it’d be a map about 50,000 times as big as the U.S., with 50,000 times as many roads and intersections.”

So next time you say “google it” faster than the speed of light, trillions of connections and petabytes of data are being sorted just to show you your search results.

Read the full article, thanks for this Google – pretty crazy stuff.