PageRank is a system for analyzing and comparing website links used by the Google search engine. The Google PageRank (PR) of a website is a numerical value from 1 to 10 that represents the number and quality of links pointing to it from other websites. Basically, Google assigns a website a score out of 10 for its “link popularity”. No one outside of Google can explain precisely how PageRank is calculated, but it involves comparing a site’s inbound and outbound links and the inbound and outbound links of sites it shares links with. PageRank (named for Google co-founder Larry Page), is one of several parts of Google’s search algorithm that determines what rises to the top of search query results. Websites with a higher PageRank score will often appear higher and more frequently in Google’s organic search results, although high PR doesn’t necessarily mean high ranking, and it’s certainly possible to get to the top of the results. search engine with a low PageRank.
The more high-quality inbound links, the higher the PageRank number. For example, CNN.com has a PR of 10 and YouTube.com has a PR of 9. Every time someone’s blog links to a CNN story or YouTube clip, Google counts that as a positive “vote” for the place. . Which means it’s a positive statement that the website is valid and useful, and something that Google would be comfortable displaying as a search result. Hundreds of thousands of “votes” for CNN and YouTube earned them their high PR numbers. However, the biggest impact on a site’s PageRank score comes from links from other websites with high PR scores. Thus, one CNN or MSNBC (PR 8) story that includes a link to YouTube.com would have a greater and more positive impact on YouTube Page Rank than hundreds (perhaps even thousands) of links from relationship blogs. low public A link to a much smaller website, say a small business with a PageRank of 4, from a big PR player like MSNBC, would have just as big an impact. It probably has enough of an impact to boost a small business’s PageRank, while three dozen blog links may not even boost it by a hair.
If you have a website and are trying to increase the number of links pointing to it, PageRank is one of the things to consider when researching and networking. It’s certainly not the only factor to consider, but if all the links to your website come from websites with a PR of 1 or 2, you’ll have a hard time increasing your own score. Many low-quality links (such as those from popular Link Farms or Link Exchange programs) are filtered out by Google and do not count toward a site’s PR score. In fact, an overabundance of low or poor quality links can significantly lower a website’s PageRank score. Quality far outweighs quantity within their page ranking system.
The easiest way to check the PageRank of a website is to install the Google Toolbar, which will display the PR of each site you visit. There are also a variety of online tools that will check a website’s page rank for you. A PageRank of zero usually means that a website is fairly new and has not yet been fully evaluated, although it may mean that the site in question is incurring some sort of penalty from Google and is being filtered out of search results. .
All search engines use link popularity as part of their website ranking algorithms, but PageRank is unique to Google, so a high or low PR will have no effect on a website’s performance on Yahoo! , Bing or any other search engine.
Learn more about Google PageRank and why it’s important for your website.
