PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Google calculates a page's importance from the votes cast for it. How important each vote is is taken into account when a page's PageRank is calculated.
PageRank is Google's way of deciding a page's importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determines a page's ranking in the search results. It isn't the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.
- Google's PageRank Explained and how to make the most of it
- PageRank™ explained (official from Google™)
- PageRank™ at WIKI
- Web Masters guidelines to get higher Google™ PageRank™ (official from Google™)
- The Google Pagerank Algorithm and How It Works
- How do I use the robots.txt file analysis tool?
How can I see my website's page rank?
The first step to increase your Google ranking is to know what you're current Page Rank is, that way you can keep track of whether your changes are working.
The only way to find out the page rank of a page is to download the Google toolbar. Page Rank is actually a measure of how likely it is that your page will be found relative to all others during a random search. Google calculates this as an integer between 1 and 2 million. This scale is then mapped to give the page rank of between 1 and 10. This means that it's not entirely accurate. Imagine that your website has a 'real' page rank of 1,000,001, and one of your competitors' page has a page rank of 1,000,000. All other things being equal, he will beat you, although both page ranks will show up as the same when scored out of 10.
- Page Rank Checker
Page Rank Checker is a free tool to check Google™ page ranking of any web site pages easily and to display your site's PageRank™ value on your web pages
- Check your pagerank online from BLOGFLUX
How to increase your PageRank
- SSW Rules to Better Google Rankings
Do you concentrate your page rank where it will do the most good?
Given that you have a certain amount of page rank to work with, the challenge becomes to decide which pages on your site are the most important, and distribute your page rank to these pages so that they turn up in search results. A simple rule to follow here is to have lot's of links to and not many links from your important pages.
Figure: The main page gets a 4.5 page rank from the 3 internal pages linking to it with 1.5 page rank.
What will make your PageRank low
Not all links are counted by Google. For instance, they filter out links from known link farms. Some links can cause a site to be penalized by Google. They rightly figure that webmasters cannot control which sites link to their sites, but they can control which sites they link out to. For this reason, links into a site cannot harm the site, but links from a site can be harmful if they link to penalized sites. So be careful which sites you link to. If a site has PR0, it is usually a penalty, and it would be unwise to link to it.
Other Resources:
- 7 Myths and Facts About Google page ranking (from wmtips.com)
- PageRank at Wikipedia
