Google Pagerank Explained
Monday, April 7th, 2008I get a lot of people asking me about Google Pagerank. When I explain that the scale for Pagerank is logarithmic like the Richter Scale I normally start to lose people.
Basically every increase in Pagerank is harder to achive. So an increase from PR2 to PR3 may be relatively easy, but an increase from PR3 to PR4 will be a little harder.
The best way to think of it is to imagine a mountain with a zero Pagerank or PR0 at the bottom and a Pagerank 10 at the top. Imagine every rise in Pagerank as a little flag on the side of the mountain…
As you can see, the flags are not equally spaced. The distance and amount of effort to reach each flag or Pagerank increases the further up you go. This is essentially how Pagerank works.
Pagerank is based roughly on the number of inbound links to a page as well as importance of the page providing the link. There are many other factors that come into play when calculating Pagerank, but the exact forumla is a closely guarded secret by Google.
Here’s what Google says about PageRank…
PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important”.
A high Pagerank doesn’t necessarily determine a high position in the Search Engine Results Page or SERP. Often you will see pages with low PageRank returned higher than high PageRank sites in the SERPs. Indeed it is possible for a page with little or no Pagerank to be returned in the #1 position for a particular keyword if Google deems it the most relevant page. This is especially true for keywords where there is low competition.
Pagerank is a general indicator of how important Google thinks your site is. It’s probably not something you should focus too much energy on. It’s far better to concentrate on your Search Engine ranking for keywords relevant to your site.
If you get the right keywords for your site and rank highly in the SERPs for these keywords, you will see a lot of traffic to your site. Better still, this will be traffic that is actually looking for what your site has to offer.
In short, Pagerank is something you should be aware of but shouldn’t focus all your attention on.
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