Understanding Google PageRank - SEO
If you want to turn your online efforts into money or want to increase revenue, you must know about Google’s PageRank (or PR). It is the method (according to Google named after one of Google’s founders, Larry Page) Google uses PageRank to determine how important our site is. And it’s of course a ranking system, ranging from 0 to 10, meaning something like:
PageRank meaning
0 not registered
1 very weak
2 weak
3 average
4 above average
5 good
6 very good
7 very good internationally
8 major site
9 top-competitors
10 the top
The higher the PageRank, the higher your site’s listed in search results. The higher in search results, the more traffic, the more traffic, the more clicks on your ads and this more revenue.
But back to Google: As they say themselves: Google interprets a link as a vote for the page. The higher the number of votes, the more important it is. Next, the link from an important page is considered of higher value, so your page’s importance rises and falls with the importance of the pages that link to you. Still following me?
If your online success is related to your position in Google’s search results, you’d better know the something about the logic behind it.
PageRank algorithm
The idea is, your site‘s (or maybe better: page‘s) importance is measured by the possibility it is clicked. With a bit of humor you’d say that is 50%: either the user does, or doesn’t. But to Google it is dead-serious. The exact algorithm is believed to be the companies closest guarded secret.
Before Google was founded in 1998, its founders were doing research at Stanford University and they published “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine”, http://ilpubs.stanford.edu:8090/361/
Now other people have read it, so you don’t have to.
Simply put, if a page links to another, its PageRank is partly added to the linked page, depending on the number of pages it links to. BTW, this is called an outbound link. From the perspective of the linked page, it’s an inbound link. Both internal (within the site’s domain) and external links are a part of the calculation.
There is a possibility that a link is clicked, but the user will at some time stop clicking links on the page, but starts on another “random” page. This is known as the damping factor.
In a small quote from the document:
We assume page A has pages T1...Tn which point to it (i.e., are citations). The parameter d is a damping factor which can be set between 0 and 1. We usually set d to 0.85. There are more details about d in the next section. Also C(A) is defined as the number of links going out of page A. The PageRank of a page A is given as follows:
PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))
Checking PageRank
You can access the PageRank easily if you use the Google Toolbar (toolbar link) which you can integrate into your browser. There’s also this site where you can look it up.
If your site isn’t yet where you want it, be aware your PageRank may not be re-calculated every day. The higher a web page's PageRank, the more frequently it will be crawled and refreshed in the Google index. If you add new content, it may take a while before anyone notices. But adding new content will add to the number of links, increasing visibility.
Putting it to practice – internal structure and links
In order to maximize external exposure, you could for a start make sure the internal links to your site’s important pages are there. You can do this with a menu with links to the homepage and most important sections, displayed on every page. Likely, some pages are visited more often than others. Links to “most popular” pages will help. A third tool is a sitemap, used to presents all content in a structured way. You can upload your sitemap to Google, so they can easily index the pages you have on your site. If a page is not indexed, it can’t be found.
Putting it to practice – external links
External linking is more important for your PageRank, but you have less control over the links. You have no way to enforce another site links to yours. But that doesn’t mean you should do nothing! It will likely take more effort though. You’ll need to be asking for links to your site, preferably links from a higher ranked page. But take care which content is linked. If your site’s homepage is linked, all the internal page’s pagerank is improved, but you may do better if the “lower-level” pages are linked to. As these will likely be more specific on a certain topic, the traffic will be more targeted. This way your site will become more important on specific topics or niches. This way, your site is built up bottom-up instead of top-down. It may take more time before you see your revenue increases, but it will have a broader base.
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