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What is Page Rank and How Does It Work?

Guest post by: Jeff Casmer

Article Overview: According to pro-seo, Check PageRank aka PR is one of the methods Google uses to determine the relevance or importance of a Web page. PageRank is a vote, by all the other Web pages on the Internet, about how important a Web page is. A link to a Web page counts as a vote of support. If there are no incoming links to a Web page then there is no support.

What is Page Rank and How Does It Work?

As 2006 faced its last weeks, Google was the favorite among search engine. Most of Google's popularity is credited to its preferred form of search engine optimization, a trademarked program Google dubbed Google PageRank. PageRank defined

According to Pro-seo, Check PageRank aka PR is one of the methods Google uses to determine the relevance or importance of a Web page. PageRank is a vote, by all the other Web pages on the Internet, about how important a Web page is. A link to a Web page counts as a vote of support. If there are no incoming links to a Web page then there is no support.

Google explains it just about the same. Each link is considered to be a vote; however, Google does not consider all votes to be equal. It considers some votes to be more important or valuable than others.

PageRank explained

Google Pagerank Search Engines operates under a democratic nature by determining web relevance with links which are considered votes. Each vote counts, but not all the votes are counted the same. During its analyses Google looks at more than just the volume of votes a webpage receives, it also takes into account the page that cast the vote.

"Important" sites help to make other sites "important." In other words if a high ranking site offers the link then Google counts this vote more heavily. Thus a link for a site in the top ten can help your website, while a link from a site that is low in rank, or doesn't relate to your site, does very little to improve your search engine ranking.

Google has designed Google PageRank to be an eight-unit measurement. It displays the value PageRank places on each website directly beside each website it displays.

Why does the page matter as opposed to the volume? Due to spamdexing Google had to make its analysis stricter. People were swapping links with one another in mass quantities, or buying them from other websites. To combat this Google made the quality of the link outweigh the actual quantity. In 2005, it designed and activated a program called nofollow, a program they designed to allow webmasters and bloggers to create links that PageRank would ignore. The same system was also used to keep spamdexing to a minimum.

Content analysis

Anyone who surfs the net knows that "important" pages mean nothing if the do not suit your needs. This is why in addition with PageRank, Google uses sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are relevant to your query.

Many SEOs are fixated with search engine ranking and this is understandable as it is one of the best ways to gain traffic, but while they are out there trying to get links from high PageRanking pages, they need to keep in mind that PageRanking alone is not enough.

To Check PageRank is essentially, only a score that represents the value of a page, as Google determines it. Getting a link to your pages from a high PR page will add some value to your page. But that does not take into account the context of the link -- the words in the link -- the anchor text. Your SEO plan should contain more than just PageRanking in order for you to have long term success on the internet.

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Article Tags: check pagerank, google, page rank, web pages



Related Forum Posts
Page Rank Changes - Hi Kevin - there is a lot of speculation as to why so many websites lost Page Rank. A few new sites that I've been following also got Page Rank for the first time. Every time Google does a Page Rank update there are websites that get caught in the crossfire and have to work to get their rankings back up!
www.tobuso.com and www.paperrollshop.com - Please take a look at these and tell me what I should do. I am too close to them to see it objectively at this point. The main on is the tobuso.com one. The other is just a paper roll side bar project. I have had a guy working on tobuso.com for about 2 weeks or so. I really dont understand why it doesnt have any Google Page Rank yet. I am starting to move up in the rankings for my targeted keyword but I am lacking in the google Page Rank and cannot figure out why. I guess it may just take more time. See if that is what it looks like to you.
Link Exchange Page Rank - Hi Shimmy, You should also look at the PageRank of the site that want to link to you. Most webmasters who look for link exchanges are very new and don't have any authority online. You won't get much benefit from a link with them. But if the site has a higher Page Rank you are much more likely to benefit. One way links are always better than link exchanges but you do still benefit from link exchanges with high quality Page Rank sites from my experience.
Nofollow Backlinks - Martin - I wouldn't rule out interior links. They may appear as 0 Page Rank because they just came online but over time they will gain PR. That Seth Godin inside post that Takuya sent is a Page Rank 5 now. Russell - Most blogs carry the nofollow link. You should check it out before posting a comment if you're doing it for SEO reasons. You can download a plugin for firefox that tells you which links are nofollow but another way to find out is to go to view --> page source and look next to the external links on the blog comments. If it says "no follow" next to them then Google doesn't count it as a link. Some forums also do "no follow" when you put your website in your signature (mine don't) so you want to check it out before getting too involved.
Page Rank Boost! - Looks like you got a nice boost from the Page Rank update as well franchisebrief!


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