Google PageRank

What is Google PageRank

Google PageRank is a number between 0 and 10 which gives a measure of the "strength" of a webpage in ranking terms. It relates to how many pages link to that page and how "strong" those pages are. Not many pages have a PageRank of 9 or 10 - these would include the Google homepage, the Yahoo homepage, the BBC homepage etc. This is because thousands of other pages on the web link to these sites. Google PageRank assumes that a page is important if another important page links to it. So if your page is linked from a BBC News article, for example, that link will give your site a 'vote of importance'.

The PageRank scale is logarithmic, in other words it is more difficult to go from 6 to 7 than it is to go from 5 to 6. Most webpages have a PageRank of between 0 and 5. If you achieve, 6, 7 or even 8 then you are doing very well. You need to have quite a lot of links to your site from other well ranked pages to achieve this.

How do you measure PageRank?

To measure PageRank you need to download the Google Toolbar (search for this in Google). On the toolbar options, you can select to show the PageRank scale, although to do this you have to deselect the privacy setting as Google has to track the sites you visit to return the PageRank of the pages.

Google PageRank refers to the strength of a page, not a site. If your homepage is a PageRank 6 then you would expect subpages within the site to have lower PageRank.

Why is PageRank important?

PageRank is one of the factors that Google uses to rank sites in search results. It assumes that a result from a better linked site is probably more important than a result from a site with fewer links, based on the premise that people link to valuable content on the web. You want the pages that you want visitors to find in search results to be the pages with the highest PageRank.

You can maximise the PageRank of a page in a number of ways. First, you can try to get external sites to link to that page. Secondly, you can get lots of the other pages on your site to link to that page, in particular pages that themselves have high PageRank, such as your homepage. Your homepage has a certain amount of "linking strength" that it can distribute to other pages linked from the homepage. The more pages there are linked from the homepage, the smaller the impact of the "linking strength" on any one page. So if your target page is linked from a particular page, you can try to cut down the number of other links from that page that will dilute the linking strength to your target page.

Why is PageRank not important?

There are lots of other factors impacting website ranking aside from PageRank and it is often erroneously considered as the be-all and end-all of search engine optimization. It is a guide to how well you are doing but a high PageRank page will by no means always be ranked better than another page with lower PageRank. The other factor to bear in mind is that the usability of your website should be maintained as high as possible, so you should be careful to not manipulate the links within your site to the detriment of your users.