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After what felt like a long hibernation period, Google has recently made at least a partial PageRank update of the visible or public PageRank, often referred to as Toolbar PageRank. And boy was it noticed--not so much with the update but with the PageRank drops targeted at sites that were buying and/or selling text links.

A lot has been said already by many who have a much deeper understanding and forecast this event. What I find particularly interesting is how PageRank has become a form of currency, yet who can say what precisely that value is? Of course, I guess that is true of currency in general. Ironically, this currency is probably unknown to the majority of Web users. After all, do your family and friends outside the industry know what PageRank is? Do they even care? And more importantly, does it affect which sites they frequent?

PageRank is especially challenging since it is hard to even arrive at a consensus within the industry. Does it impact rankings? If so, by how much? Is it merely a visual representation of other signals? And is Toolbar PageRank any real indicator of true PageRank? All good questions. Like many things related to SEO and rankings, we must accept that we may never have a completely, air-tight answer. It seems that one can always point to an example that appears to defy the answers, but perhaps that is exactly how Google likes it.

Google Trends results for 'pagerank' and 'page rank'

(Credit: Google Trends)

If you have been buying or selling text links and seen your PageRank drop, then you should turn to your analytics program or log stats to see if any noticeable changes appear there. If you have been tracking keyword ranking, you should check that as well to see what changes, if any, appear there. And hopefully you'll share your results with the rest of us.

At least for the time being, if PageRank rating is at all important to you, I'd stay away from buying or selling text links. Maybe this will blow over, maybe not. Unless detecting paid linking can be truly automated and handled algorithmically though, it's hard to imagine a scalable way of handling this long term. But maybe Google's hope is that by targeting highly visible sites and getting the industry talking about it, many sites will fall into line on their own out of the fear of repercussions.

As a result of all this, Google has perhaps just raised the cost of PageRank-based links. Certainly, links bought will now have to appear completely natural without any hint of commercial motivation. In this way, we can expect to see the black market of PageRank selling to grow and to see the cost of PageRank-based links to reach all-new levels.

For the rest of us, this will only reinforce good old SEO practices. Develop great content that authority sites will want to link to. Participate within your online community not only as a way to develop links, but to interact with your target audience. Make social media part of your online plan. After all, what's better than top rankings but being so well known for whatever it is you want to be known that people go directly to your site to begin with?

And clearly, as we can see from Google Trends reporting, Google PageRank falling does at least create quite a buzz.

Links are the fundamental vehicle that gets us from here to there on the web. Without them, we'd have no where to go, or at least a much harder time getting there. Links are, of course, deeply important to search engines as well. In fact, links and PageRank are at the very core of Google.

Spend a little time on just about any website and it won't be long before you come across a "click here," "click this," or "more" link. You probably wouldn't trade a $20 bill for $5, yet that is exactly what is happening when you use completely generic, non-descriptive anchor text with your links.

Search engines place even greater weight on links as another signal of what the destination page and site is about. While this is one of the basics of SEO, there seems to be no shortage of suboptimal links in the world. Links, whether internal or external, are too valuable to waste.

If you've ever wondered how much value search engines, Google especially, place on anchor text, just do a search for "click here" and see what shows up in the top of the results. The top search result has consistently been, for as long as I can remember, the Adobe Acrobat Reader® download page. Now click on the link for the cached version in Google and you'll see a little message stating:

These terms only appear in links pointing to this page: click here.

Anchor text is so powerful that it enables a page that doesn't feature the phrase "click here," to show up on page 1 of Google (as well as the other major search engines) out of over 1 billion competing results. Actually, neither the word "click" nor the word "here" appears at all on the Adobe page. This is the result of thousands of links pointing to this specific page from other sites; sites that have directed their visitors to Adobe's Acrobat Reader to insure that their visitors can access a PDF file download on the site. This phenomenon has a name: "Google bombing." Realistically, most sites will not naturally garner enough links to cause this kind of result, but it does help to illustrate the importance of anchor text.

Use links just like you use a page's title as a way to tell search engines, as well as users, what the page is all about. The difference is the anchor text of the link is talking about the destination page. And just like title tags, anchor text is an excellent area to incorporate your keywords. The anchor text of your links should be kept short and sweet yet descriptive, which keeps them user friendly while also maintaining strong keyword focus for search engines.

If you find that you have a lot of suboptimal links on your site, you can probably do a little rewording of those links to make them optimized. Creating optimal anchor text, when you can, is even more important for external links. This is also why it is important to use textual links instead of image links whenever you can. At a minimum, if you must use an image for the link, be sure to include an alt attribute, or better yet, use the CSS "image replacement" technique.

For example, if I was linking to a page on Zappos.com for men's sneakers, rather than this:

Click here to see men's sneakers at Zappos,

I might reword that sentence to read,

See men's sneakers at Zappos.

While the rewording doesn't really change the meaning to humans and may not seem all that different, it does carry much greater and more accurate meaning to search engines. Realistically, a site, even one as popular as Zappos, would be challenged to have any pages rank for "click here," even if they wanted to, but ranking for "men's sneakers" would not only more probable, but also worthwhile. Best of all, this is one of those simple things that carries tremendous value that nearly every site can improve on.