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Some time ago, a search engine emerged with a new way of thinking. It was called Google and was started by two PhD students at Stanford University, Sergey Brin and Larry Page. They developed a new way of evaluating web pages called PageRank. The Internet has never been the same again.

PageRank is an important part of the Google algorithm, although not as important today as it was when it was introduced. PageRank relies heavily on incoming links and the the number of in-bound links to a page like a vote for a it's true value. The more incoming links a page has the better it is in the eyes of the Google Search Engine.

The value of each incoming link itself varies based on the PageRank of the page the link comes from. With PageRank, Google proved to be very good at serving up relevant web pages. And so Google became the most popular and successful search engine on the Internet. A position it still holds today.

Because PageRank measures off-page factors, Google felt it would be more difficult for webmasters to manipulate, and it was. But as the phrase goes, 'all good things must come to an end'.

And so webmasters have developed link manipulation schemes that influence the search engine results and make PageRank less effective. Many sites have focused on exchanging links, buying links and selling links on a massive scale. PageRank's reliance on links as a vote of confidence in a page's value has been undermined as webmasters create links purely to influence their Google ranking.

This manipulation of PageRank has in turn prompted Google to look for new factors upon which to rank webpages. The other major search engines (MSN and Yahoo) joined in with Google and each one of them began to develop their own new and more advanced webpage ranking algorithms. PageRank is now only one of more than 100 factors that Google looks at in ranking pages.

Search engines keep their ranking algorithms secret to prevent webmasters from cheating to get to the top of the search engine results. In the future, search engines may use hundreds of factors in ranking webpages. And these factors will continue to change as the search engines try to prevent webmasters from cheating.

Without direct access to search engine technology, much of the current SEO thinking about what works and what does not work for SEO is based on speculation. Webmasters and SEO professionals are hard at work testing the different approaches to search optimization in an effort to gain the upper hand and get their webpages to the top of the search engine results. Over time these experiments reveal the effective SEO factors for webmasters. But it's an on going process with no end in sight.

Please feel free to visit my website promotion blog for more information on PageRank and other SEO factors that work today