What is Google PageRank?
Google PageRank is a series of complex, mathematical algorithms used to determine a level of importance (on a scale of 1-10) to a web page based on the links that point to it from other web pages. Pages are ranked on a numeric scale, with zero having the lowest significance and ten the highest. The goal of any website is to achieve a high Google PageRank and link with other websites that have similarly high PageRanks as well.
Google PageRank | Understanding the scale
I was watching the news when the earthquake in Japan hit in mid March and was listening to the experts discuss the Richter Scale. While the mathematical difference between a 9 and an 8 would be 1, the severeness of an earthquake reaching a level 9 is actually 16 times greater than an 8. The differences on the scale with the Google PageRank and the Richter Scale are similar in that aspect. Therefore, if you have a website with a Google PageRank of 2, it is actually 16 times bigger than a PageRank of 1; a PageRank of 3 is 16 times better than a PageRank of 2, and so on. Just to give you an idea of some scales here:
- Google PageRank 4 is 4,096 times better than PageRank 1
- Google PageRank 5 is 65,536 times better than PageRank 1
- Google PageRank 5.1 86,475 times better than PageRank 1
- Google PageRank 7 is 4,294,967,296 (over 4 billion) times better than PageRank 1
Therefore, being able to increase your PageRank and link with others with higher PageRanks will significantly impact the level of importance that your website is given in the eyes of Google. Conversely, if you are linking to sites that are significantly lower in PageRank or are ‘bad neighbors’ in Google’s eyes, or even if the link no longer exists, then you are deemed by Google to have less significance and your rankings will drop.
Google PageRank | Debunking Myths
According to SearchEngineWatch.com, here are 5 things that Google PageRank is NOT:
- Google PageRank acts like a vote for one page by another. It’s a great description for lay people, but it really doesn’t work that way — and is actually quite misleading. If you are, or want to be, an SEO professional, it’s really worth understanding PageRank properly: read Matt Cutt’s post that I linked above (or read the original paper). A good analogy would be that is calculates the probability that a web surfer will end up on any given page if he or she follows links around the web at random. One immediate impact from this is that linking out actually reduces a page’s PageRank. It also shows us that a link from a page with many incoming links is better from a page that has just a few.
- Sites have PageRank. No, they don’t! Google PageRank applies just to individual pages, not to sites as a whole. People often refer to the PageRank of their site, but what they are actually referring to (unwittingly or otherwise) is the PageRank of their site’s home page. It is thought that Google does have another link based algorithm, often referred to as DomainRank, that works in exactly the same way as PageRank, but at the domain level, not the page level. But that’s a different story. It’s also worth noting that home pages tend to have higher PageRanks than pages within a site, as they tend to have more links pointing to them.
- Google PageRank relates directly to traffic. It doesn’t. Google PageRank is an indicator of a page’s latent ability to rank, but says nothing about how it is actually ranking or for what terms it is ranking. Think of it as a potential. For actual rankings to occur, Google also has to associate a given page with one or more keywords, however strongly, and it uses entirely different algorithms to do that (both link based and otherwise). So, it is not uncommon to see, for example, a Google PageRank 3 page getting orders of magnitude more traffic than a PageRank 5 page, because the former is strongly associated with some popular keywords, and the latter is potentially not strongly associated with anything. However, it’s reasonable to assume that between two pages equally associated with the same keywords, the one with the stronger PageRank would rank higher in the results (although all the usual caveats in the information given above still apply).
- Google PageRank shows how important Google thinks your site is. No. PageRank is just one of many factors that Google employs for indexing sites and ranking them.
- PageRank is Google’s only link-related algorithm. Again, false — although when Google first started this was probably true. They now use calculations based on links for all sorts of other things to do with indexation, ranking, and keyword association. http://searchenginewatch.com/3642190
Under Creative Commons License: Attribution
Original Picture Source: http://www.flickr.com/photos/dannysullivan/473165018/
If you liked ‘Google PageRank Explained’, then you may also enjoy other articles written by Black Box Social Media.
Article: Google PageRank Explained