While you can do your own SEO (and sometimes we train clients on Search Engine Optimization rather than doing it for them), one of the reasons to hire an SEO Consultant instead is that the sheer number of things-that-might-effect-SEO-but-you-don’t-know-how is huge, and growing.

Google’s SEO God Matt Cutts took one of those off the table a few weeks back.

In this video, Mr. Cutts came as close to providing the actual formula behind one piece of how Google sees Page Rank (or literally, PageRank) as we’re ever likely to see, absent an anti-trust-related order.

Google is famously closed-lipped about how their search ranking algorithm works, leaving SEO Consultants to figure it out ourselves. But in that video, Cutts explains exactly how much “juice” the links you send out split amonst pages you link to—at least within the context of distributing the value of your PageRank to other sites and pages.

Since your PageRank is of more value to those to whom you link than it is to you, this information would be meaningless, except for one thing: Matt Cutts, Google’s lead Seacrh Engine something-or-other, has told us that link juice is finite, follows simple math rules, and can be divided according to a set formula. So if this page becomes a PageRank 4 over time, and we have four links eminating from it, each one is worth “one PageRank point”. And if three of them all go to the same place, then we have a formula by which we can dole out three “points” as we see fit.

Wow.

Google’s Secret Sauce isn’t always terribly filling, and it’s certainly not for those with immature palettes. But at least we now have some idea about not just what the ingredients in the Secret Sauce are, but also how much of one ingredient can be relied on in pursuing Search Engine Optimization.