As hard as it is to assess ANY job candidate’s knowledge, it’s even harder with SEO candidates because there’s so much gray area in the industry. This blog series presents questions you can pose to help you determine a candidate’s level of knowledge.
Explain PageRank, its importance, and how it factors into SEO.
The candidate should be able to provide a layman’s explanation of PageRank. If the position requires direct interaction with non-technical people, it will be important that they are able to convey this in an easy to understand way.
Here’s how I would answer:
In a nutshell, PageRank is Google’s way of assessing a web page’s value based on the number, quality, and relevance of links pointing to it. Every link pointing into or out of a page passes value. The higher the value of the incoming links, the higher the value of the outgoing links.
PageRank was an important measure for SEOs and link builders as they would seek out links from high PageRank sites in order to increase the value of their own site. However, Google no longer makes the PageRank value of any page public, so it can no longer be used for link acquisition.
When link building, it’s better to focus on getting links by relevance for your audience and your own assessment of the quality of the site doing the linking.