SEO Basics: Understanding Page Rank

PageRank is Google’s term for how important a site is. Although not the only factor in how your website ranks in the search engines, it is one of the major factors. As many people know, PageRank is determined by the number of links pointed at a website. However, there are a lot of subtleties and many other PageRank factors unknown to all but Google insiders.

Google displays PageRank on a scale of 0-10. However, in reality, it is a logarithmic function. For example, 10 out of 100 could be a displayed Page Rank of 2 while 80 out of 100 could be a 9. Of course, 100 is just a made up number, there are lots of different values of links that would on the 100 points scale, be a fraction of a point.

The system for PageRank is that each link is a vote of confidence in another site. If an important site links to you, you will obtain more importance than if a non-important site linked to you. Also, the vote is divided by the number of links the page has. For instance, if a page has a PageRank of 4 and there are 4 links on the page, the vote will be divided into four equal parts.

Note: It should be evident by now that large auto-submit directories and link farms aren’t very beneficial to your PageRank as whatever PageRank they have will be divided among hundreds and hundreds of links.

You should note that all pages have a PageRank. It may be so small that it displays as 0, but it has a PageRank nonetheless. That means, as you have more content on your site, your PageRank will naturally go up. Obviously this requires lots and lots of content and your site must be well connected to distribute the PageRank. However, as any of the content on your site becomes important, your site’s overall importance will increase and the more content, the more of a chance that your PageRank will increase.

Now comes the common question:

Q: Wouldn’t all of your pages start ranking better if a few articles here and there got a lot of links?

A: Of course! That’s why the common adage that “content is king” exists. By linking to your other pages with a navigation panel or sidebar, your pages are constantly giving one other votes. However, you must be aware that by the same token, your site can “leak” PageRank for linking to other sites. This shouldn’t be a big deal though and by creating useful website, you are definitely going to have to link to other websites at times anyways.

So, in short, to increase your PageRank, create a useful website people want to use. Good luck! :]

Here’s a link for those interested in reading the essay the founders of Google wrote on PageRank among other things:
http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

Disclaimer: Remember, PageRank is NOT the only factor is search engine rank.