What does Google’s PageRank mean?
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Dave, maybe you can explain something for me: my Web site limehat.com apparently has a PageRank of two out of ten (2/10), and I don’t really understand what that means. Does it mean, for example, that my company site is #2 out of 10 hits?
It’s hard to pin down exactly what Google means when it talks about PageRank, but the best definition is that its a rough indication of the popularity of a Web page. A higher PageRank indicates a more popular page.
Notice here that I’m not talking about Web sites here too: Google considers every page of a Web site to be an autonomous entity, one thing that quite frequently confuses people. We’ve all been taught to think about Web sites, but the new, modern Web is all about separate autonomous pages, not sites at all.
Let’s jump back to PageRank for a moment, though. Google PageRank is a measure of the relative popularity of a site, ranging from…
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Tom Schavo
July 17th, 2008
at 2:20am
PageRank is the algorithm used by the Google search engine, originally formulated by Sergey Brin and Larry Page.
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.”
Important, high-quality sites receive a higher PageRank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search. Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines all aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.
- Google is a SE to which page rank plays the most important role in site relevancy.
- The higher PR is the higher your page in search results is.
- PR, or Page Rank, is a number assigned by Google which represents to relative importance of a web page.
- The PR for a web page can vary between 0 and 10.
- PR is assigned to individual web pages, not to web sites. In other words, it is Page Rank, not Site Rank.
- A higher PR number will help you to score better in your SERPS (search engine results pages), which will bring more visitors to a web page.
- PR is calculated using a complex secret formula which seems to be under constant change.
- In general, the more web pages that link to your web page, the higher the PR of your page will be.
- Other factors which affect the PR of your web page include the PR of the pages which link to your page and the number of links on the pages which link to your page. A link from a PR7 page is worth more than a link from a PR6 page. A link from a PR5 page with two outbound links is worth more than a link from a PR5 page with six outbound links.
- The higher PR is more often the site is being indexed.
- Google does not sell placement within the results themselves (i.e., no one can buy a higher PageRank).