by iWEBTOOL.com
The basic understanding of Google PageRank - carefully explained and what you can do with it - written by top SEO experts

According to Google, the PageRank given to a website indicates the website's importance, and is calculated from sites linking to a page. For instance, if PAGE A has a text link to PAGE B then PAGE B will be ranked higher as PAGE A is "voting" for PAGE B. However, although it seems very straightforward, many different factors are considered while calculating the PageRank. The page casting vote also will be inspected by Google.

Google analyzes the webpage that has the text link to another website and looks at various qualities of the webpage. For instance, one of the foremost quality is the PageRank of the webpage that has the link to another website. The higher the PageRank of the "linker", the higher the link will value. For example, if PAGE A has a PageRank of 5 and is linking to PAGE B. This link will be valued more as PAGE A has a high PageRank of 5. Whereas if PAGE A had a small PageRank of 2 then this link will not be valued as much. Another factor that is taken into consideration is the amount of links on a webpage. If PAGE A has only one link on the page, it will be valued much more than if it were to have five links on the page.

An important information most webmasters tend to forget nowadays is that PageRank isn't as relevant to search results ranking as it use to be. There was a time when PageRank had a very important impact on the search results from Google but in the recent changes, Google has developed new factors and PageRank isn't as critical now.

Page Rank depends uniquely upon the egalitarian nature of the web with the use of its enormous link structure as a marker of the individual page assessment. In essence, Google interprets a link from one page to another page as a vote, by the former page for the latter page. However, Google inspects more than the utter quantity of votes, or links a page takes delivery of, but it also investigates the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves important and in a good way help to make other pages important. Important sites with higher quality in terms of every aspect receive higher Page Ranks that Google essentially remembers each time it carries out a search. However it is also true that these so named important pages end up being unfavorable if they do not match the searcher's query. Hence Google has the technology to combines Page Rank with sophisticated text-matching techniques and finds pages that are both important and relevant to a particular search.

Looking into a little more detail it can be said that Page Rank is in fact truly related to link popularity, however the calculation is reliant upon the quality and strength of the links, and not just the mere link numbers. This point demands the explanation in further more. Google in fact searches more sites more quickly, delivering the most relevant results. It is also a fact that Google runs upon an inimitable amalgamation of highly developed hardware and software. The speed experienced by the searchers or users can be endorsed partly to the efficiency of the search algorithm and partly to the thousands of low cost PC's that are networked together to create a super fast search engine.

Google PageRank (PR) is a link analysis algorithm developed by Google’s Larry Page and Sergey Brin in the late 1990s. Google PageRank contributes to your search engine ranking on Google search engine results pages (SERPs).

Google PageRank is one benchmark for understanding the popularity of your web site based on the number and quality of sites that link to you. A high PR page that links to your web page will confer more PageRank to your page than an inbound link from low PR page.

According to Matt Cutts, Google’s spokesperson on SEO, PageRank values are published approximately once every 3 months. Therefore, Google PR is not an accurate metric for site popularity, as it is a cached value that is usually out of date.

What’s my Google PageRank?

If you want to view your Google PageRank, you can download the Google Toolbar or try the nifty SearchStatus plugin for FireFox.

The Google Toolbar’s PageRank feature displays as a green bar on the bottom right of your browser window. Scroll over and you will see a visited page’s PageRank as a whole number between 0 and 10, with PR 10 web site being the most popular.

For those who are not familiar with Google's Page Rank, which is commonly known as PR, it is Google's calculation or score of a web page based on external and internal linking of a site, as well as on-page criteria of the web page being linked to as well as the web page
being linked from. The Page Rank calculation is much more detailed and complex, and we go into the calculation in more detail later in the tutorial, as well point out other places that you can read up on how Google calculates a web page's PR.

Before you can begin to develop or increase the PageRank of your website and individual web pages, you will need to evaluate what the PageRank of your site's pages is currently. To view the PR of your site you will need to download the Google Toolbar.

PageRank is in some ways related to link popularity, but the calculation is dependant on the quality and strength of the links, not just the number of links. So, how does one go about building and increasing their Page Rank. It is not as difficult as some may think.

Internal linking Internal linking also plays a factor in the Page Rank of the pages
within a site. It is most common to see the homepage, index.htm, to have the highest PR of the website.

The linking structure within the site should follow the themed approach to internal linking, which stresses importance on minimizing linking between 2nd and 3rd level directories and pages.

Let's run through an example. The homepage of your site has a PageRank of 6. This usually means that there are a good number of other websites that link to your homepage that also have a PR of 5,6, and above. You link your homepage that has a PR of 6, to your second level pages, which will in turn have a PR of 5. You link all of these second
level pages to each other, which will not affect the PageRank of the pages. Now, you link all of the secondary pages that have a PR of 5 to the tertiary pages that will in turn have a PR of 4. If you have quarternary pages, you would link the tertiary pages that have a PR of
4 to the quarternary pages that would in turn have a PR of 3.


Why does this PR reduction take place when digging deeper into the structure of your website? There have been many discussions, theories, and speculations among the search engine optimization professionals in the industry as to why this takes place. Some think that Google does this as a result of the deep structure as it does not prefer it. Others think that this PR reduction takes place as a result of the smaller amount of internal linking that takes place. Instead, why not consider all of the factors? The tertiary and quarternary pages have several different characteristics than the primary and secondarypages. These pages with the lower PR are deeper in the site structure,
have less internal linking, and in most cases less external linking. What can be done to make sure that these important pages that are deeper in the site increase their PageRank?

Since the internal linking of your site plays a factor, not in increasing PR, but in sharing the PR of the site, and the dilution ofyour keyword strength and theme, it is important to review the internal linking structure of your site. If your linking structure follows the example above, then there are modifications that could bemade to improve the site's internal linking. Follow this checklist ofinternal linking questions and comments: Make sure that your primary page(s), the index.htm page, links to your
secondary pages or secondary levels. Make sure that your secondary pages link to each other Link your secondary pages to the third level pages within their sub-directory, sub-domain, or level Link the third level pages within each specific sub-directory or sub-domain to each other.

If the pages that you link to off your web pages are not relevant to your own content, they will not help you in any way to receive a better ranking on Google.

If you link to pages that are not already considered important to Google due to their own content and their own ranking, they won't help you much at all.

The bottom line? Don't link to someone just because they'll link to you. This will NOT help your ranking. Link to other sites because they have quality content that directly relates to the content of your site in some way.

Think of it this way; link to sites that will offer your visitors relevant information to what they came to your site for. Actually visit the sites you link to and make sure that they offer quality content instead of 'fluff'.

Remember that Google's main purpose is to provide relevant search results to the people that use the Google Search Services. To keep their users happy, they only want to send them to sites that are considered important not only because of the content they provide, but because they are considered important enough by related sites to actually provide a link to them as a resource.

While Google is not the ONLY search engine optimization there, it is the most widely used 'provider' of search results. Many of the 'major' search engines get their results directly from Google! A strong page rank and high ranking in Google can mean free search engine optimization from other search engines that normally only accept 'paid inclusions'.

Some web masters refuse to exchange relevant links due to a page rank of less than 4 of 10. This may bite you later, if the site that wants to link to you now, ranks higher later. Don't refuse a link exchange solely due to their lacking page rank.

If a site has quality content, and it's relevant to your site, exchange links with them anyway. Just because they don't have a high page rank today, doesn't mean they won't soon be considered important in the eyes of the Google-bots.

Keep your link exchanges relevant, and make sure the content of the sites you link to is good, solid information. Soon enough, you'll find these quality sites wanting to link to you too. Remember, content really is the most important thing... they don't call it the 'information super highway' for nothing you know!

If you have ever done any reading about search engine optimization or were just curious how you can get your site to the top of the Google search engine results, understanding PageRank is vital. I’m going to introduce you to the basics of PageRank and also provide a brief discussion on how much you should really worry about PageRank if you are running a website or Internet business.

Google’s founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, invented PageRank and it forms the basis for how Google works. Google didn’t become the best search engine in the world by chance, it became the best search engine because it provided the best results. PageRank is in fact the technology that gave Google its competitor-killing edge, a way to greatly improve the accuracy and validity of a search response to a user query.

In essence PageRank provides a means to determine the value of a website for any given search term or keyword phrase. This value is determined by how websites link together with the more popular (and theoretically better) sites receiving more links. It’s these incoming links that help the site have a high PageRank value and thus display higher up in search results.