What is PageRank?

By Matt Colyer
Posted Tuesday, July 20, 2004

What is Pagerank? - Pagerank is based on how many links to one website. PageRank is a value that represents how important a page is on the web. Robots or Spiders figures that when one page links to another page, it is casting a vote for the other page. Also the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote is. It matters because it is one of the most important factors that determines a page's ranking in the search results but It isn't the only factor that Search engines uses to rank pages. Not all links are counted by Search engines. Some links can cause a site to be penalized by Search engines.

Internal linking - Internal linking also plays a factor in the Page Rank of the pages within a site. 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. Example - The homepage has a PageRank of 5. You link your homepage that has a PageRank of 5, to other web pages on your site, which will in turn have a PR of 3 or 4. Now, you link all of the secondary pages that have a PR of 4 to the tertiary pages that will in turn have a PR of 3.

External Linking - External linking is the biggest factor in determining a web sites PageRank. Increasing your PageRank is very difficult, but important. The actual amount of effect that Search engines PageRank has on the ranking of a website or web pages is debated, but what we do know is that a web page's PR does play a big role in Google's indexing and Google's ranking. The higher a web page's PageRank, the more frequently it will be crawled and refreshed. While in most cases, a higher PR will accompany a higher-ranking site; it is not always the case. PageRank is a pretty complex mathematical calculation, but can be broken down into a simple version. PageRank is Google's scoring of Page 1. This scoring is based on the links that point to Page 1, and certain variables within the pages that the links come from. 1 link from Page 2 is held as a vote for Page 1, and if Page 2 has a high PageRank, this will is taken into account and will have a positive effect when calculating the Page Rank of Page 1. If Page 2, 3, and 4, all link to Page 1, but Page 2, 3, and 4 all have a PageRank of 3, then this will be taken into account when calculating the web page's PageRank. In the second situation, the pages with low PageRank's that link to Page 1 will not affect Page 1's PageRank in a negative effect, but also will not affect it in a positive way.

About the Author
Matt Colyer is the owner of the Marhen.com Network which includes (www.linkexchangeit.com) and is a part-time SEO. He also is a php, CGI and ASP developer.