Website Page Rank 101
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The term Page Rank is well known amongst savvy website owners. Page Rank, PageRank, or PR all refer to the same thing and are usually associated with the Google search engine. Google is not the only search engine that utilizes Page Rank algorithms. However, the term ‘PageRank’ is a Google trademark.
So what’s PR exactly? Simply put, PageRank is an estimation of the relative importance of a certain web page. This estimate is derived from complex measurement algorithms that analyze links found on websites and then assign a numerical weight to each web page giving it a measured importance within the context of the rest of the all the WWW web sites.
To put this differently, a PageRank is similar to a popularity contest or a ballot result. This ballot is amongst every page on the internet and every hyperlink to your page counts as one vote of support in this ballot. More inbound links to a web page indicate more support for that page online, and in this case support indicates popularity.
So, you may ask, is this then like elections, one vote per person? Not exactly, even in online ballots super delegates exist. The popularity or PageRank of websites that link to your web page is also taken into consideration. The more incoming links to your site from high PageRank sites, the higher PageRank your site will get.
Google describes PageRank as:
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”.
So who wins this popularity contest?
There isn’t exactly a winner. Google assigns a numeric weighting from 0-10 for each web page on the Internet. Google naturally ranks most of its pages at 10; that makes them the winner of this ballot.
A PR of 0 indicates no support and less popularity, a higher number means more support and more popularity for a web page.
As the numbers go up, they become harder and harder to gain, the difference between a PR of 2 and a PR of 3 is not just 1 point. In actuality, the scale for PageRank is logarithmic, in other words it’s like the Richter Scale that is used to measure the strength of earth quakes.
In conclusion, PR is based on the quantity of inbound links as well as importance of the pages providing these inbound links.
PageRank is a very good indicator of how much traffic a website page gets.
Other articles on UsefulTalk will discuss how to increase your web site’s page rank.
