The author is a doctor who is self-taught in website design and SEO. He started with a website in 2,000 that was basically a set of webpages based on my his patient information leaflets. The website was set up for the benefit of his patients, and it came as a surprise to find that others were finding the website and reading it.

 Some of the webpages, on relatively small-print keywords, reached #1 on Google.

Three webpages, at various times, dropped from #1 to #2. The obvious question was “What did the page that was now in #1 position have that my now #2 page did not?”

From a medical point of view, the new #1 pages were not as accurate as his own and the content was not of high quality from the medical point of view. From an on-page SEO point of view, they did not seem to be high quality. Scoring checks were run with Website Auditor and IBP, and his pages had significantly better scores.

That left off-page optimisation – links from other websites – as the only option. The new #1 webpages had one or two incoming links with minimal link value (SEO SpyGlass) and PageRank 0. Again, his pages had more link juice and PageRank 1 or 2.

As far as he could see, there was no explanation for the new webpages achieving #1 position according to everything he had ever read. He has a research background and a University of London doctorate. Here was a fascinating research opportunity.

There was one common element to the three webpages that had pushed three of his #1 webpages to #2: They were all articles published by journalists in different national newspapers’ websites.

It became apparent that it was not the authorities of the individual webpages that were pushing his webpages down, but the authority of their respective websites. Whilst the PageRanks of the new #1 webpages were all 0, the Homepage PageRanks ranged from 6 to 8.

There were many experts who had claimed that PageRank is irrelevant in SEO because they could quote webpages with PageRank 0 that were on the top page of Google for highly competitive keywords. When he checked these pages out, he confirmed that most still had PR 0 but their Homepage PageRanks were at least 5.

With an Excel sheet, he looked at the PageRanks of the URLs of the top 10 webpages for numerous keywords and their corresponding Homepage PageRanks. Homepage PageRank was clearly the #1 factor as far as Google was concerned; however, it did not explain a few exceptions to the rule, mainly for medium difficulty keywords.

These exceptions to the rule became the next focus for attention. There were some top positioned webpages with Homepage PageRank of 0. With few exceptions, these top page positioned webpages with PageRank 0 for medium keyword difficulty were themselves Homepages.

Google is all about “authority” as indicated by links from other websites. Google is clearly assuming that the Homepage of a website has that website’s greatest authority, and Google is providing a boost in effective PageRank to Homepages that are competing for a keyword (#2 factor in the Google algorithm).

It proved impossible to give a numerical value to this Homepage PageRank boost by manually inputting the data into Excel – it was too time-consuming.

V1.0 Keyword SEO Pro program was produced, which put all the required data into a table that could be exported into Excel. It became apparent that the boost was between 4 and 5, but for Homepages with PageRanks of 5 or more, there was no discernable boost.

The V2.0 Keyword SEO Pro adds the Factor 2 boost to the effective Homepage PageRank to a maximum of 5. With experience, he would now recommend that a new website should only target keywords with average adjusted Homepage PageRank keyword difficulty (HPR-KD) of no more than 4.3. Only the Homepage of a newly indexed website can compete for any meaningful keyword.