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All You Ever Wanted To Know About PageRank

By corbyboy ⋅ January 6, 2009 ⋅ Post a comment

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™ algorithm, to examine the entire link structure of the web and determine which pages are most important

Google say it themselves, they use more than 200 factors to rank a page in the search results and PageRank is just one of them. So why do people focus on PageRank so much rather than the other factors? In my opinion there are two main reasons.

The first is that simply, PageRank used to be the most important factor. It may still be the biggest factor, but it certainly isn’t as important as it used to be.

Secondly, is that PageRank is the only factor that can be quantified. Sure, the data we get from Google can be anything up to three months out of date, but it is the only data we have. Google may use 200 different factors to rank a website, but we don’t know what these factors are or how Google ranks our sites according to these factors.

Where Do I Find My PageRank?

There are a many tools out there on the Internet that give you the PageRank of your chosen page. A quick search will help you find one. You can also get the PageRank of a page by installing the Google Toolbar. You will see a little green bar that indicates the PageRank of the current page. You can hover over it to see the value.

Both of these methods use the same source so should give you the same result. Bear in mind that the data is only refreshed a few times each year, and the data you see can be up to three months old. When Google puts its data together to determine the search result listings, it works with its current, up to date information. We webmasters have no way of getting this fresh data, so have to rely on the old, stale data that Google gives us.

Incidentally, if you want to know when Google updates its Toolbar PageRank, Matt Cutts, a gGoogle engineer, usually posts confirmation on his blog or on Twitter. Subscribing to his blog and following hime on Twitter would be very advisable if you are keen on tracking your own PageRank.

In Summary

PageRank is a useful metric in establishing how popular a website is, but it is not the only thing that matters. Keep in mind that it is just one of over 200 factors that Google uses to rank your web pages.

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