Google's system for ranking pages involves more than 200 types of information... and PageRank is just 1.

If you read this page on Google’s site you’d certainly believe that PageRank is still the most influential gauge of how your pages are ranked [excerpt]:

‘PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important." Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.’

However, if you read this piece reported by the New York Times, you might decide that things have changed [excerpt]:

‘As Google compiles its index, it calculates a number it calls PageRank for each page it finds. This was the key invention of Google’s founders, Mr. Page and Sergey Brin. PageRank tallies how many times other sites link to a given page. Sites that are more popular, especially with sites that have high PageRanks themselves, are considered likely to be of higher quality. Mr. Singhal [current master of Google’s ranking algorithm] has developed a far more elaborate system for ranking pages, which involves more than 200 types of information, or what Google calls “signals.” PageRank is but one signal. Some signals are on Web pages — like words, links, images and so on. Some are drawn from the history of how pages have changed over time. Some signals are data patterns uncovered in the trillions of searches that Google has handled over the years.’

You could conclude the genie is out of the bottle and that Google’s engineers are far from allowing an abuse of links to undermine their ability to determine what is and what is not relevant. After all, those links could be paid for, recruited, gathered solely for the purpose of gaming the search engine rankings and/ or they may simply be irrelevant. If you think about Google’s interest in finding, organizing and then providing all searchers with the best set of answers possible… and why [profitable business that depends on loyal search traffic], it shouldn’t surprise anyone they have and will continue to advance their systems. This is certainly not to say you shouldn’t recruit and provide relevant links. You should; however know that it’s not the simple exercise it once was and that you should be very concerned with the quality [as opposed to sheer quantity] of your links.

We believe that if you transfer a consistent stream of [your] subject- specific knowledge [answers] to the web by writing or blogging you can actually help Google [and Yahoo, MSN, etc., etc.] If you help them with good information, including what is timely & new, they may just reward you with competitive positioning in their search results pages [SERPs.].

As for a Real Estate Blogsite™, it’s a leading- edge content management solution, preconfigured to serve the ‘business requirements’ of a Real Estate Professional

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