All You Ever Wanted To Know About PageRank
PageRank (PR) is one of those terms that everybody who has a website seems to talk about. Everybody who “does SEO” knows what PR is and how to boost it. But what exactly is PageRank? What does it mean to increase it? Why would you want to? We will take a look at all of these issues in this article.
What Exactly is PageRank?
PageRank is an algorithm invented by the founders of Google that assigns an “importance” rating to every page that it indexes. It is on a logarithmic scale from 0-10. This means that each of the 11 ratings is 10 times higher than the previous one. For example, PR 4 is ten times higher than PR 3. PR 8 is 100 times higher than PR 6.
Essentially, pages with a higher PR are more important, or more specifically, more popular, than pages with a lower PR.
What Determines PageRank?
When Google crawls a hyperlink, it counts it as a “vote” for the destination page from the source page. By linking to that page, the source page is saying “I endorse this website. It is good.” Importantly, however, each vote is weighted, so all votes are not equal. What makes a vote worth more? A higher PR of the source page of course. So pages with a higher PR have more influence in boosting the PR of other pages with a lower PR. So it is not just the quantity of links that influences PR, it is the quality of those links too.
Is all this confusing? It can be if you are unfamiliar with the concept. Let’s look at it with an illustration.
Example PageRank illustration
In this illustration the coloured circles represent pages on different websites. The numbers inside represent the PageRank of that page. The arrow represents a hyperlink. You can see that site A has 6 inbound links with a PR of 3, while site B has only 4 inbound links and a PR of 4. This is because the sites that link to site B have higher PRs themselves. They are more authoratative in the eyes of Google, therefore their links are more important.
Why is There Such A Buzz About PageRank?
We use more than 200 signals, including our patented PageRank
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