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PageRank - Erroneous Beliefs That Many SEOs Perceive as Indisputable Facts

Guest post by: Cristian Lungu

Article Overview: Some valuable insights like how PageRank is calculated and how it flows across the web community. The majority of these facts are basically mysteries for many SEOs building a business online.

PageRank - Erroneous Beliefs That Many SEOs Perceive as Indisputable Facts

The dual Nature of PageRank PageRank is simply a way for Google to measure the relative importance of each web page in its index, based on the frequency they're referred to throughout the internet. A more technical approach defines PageRank as being a link analysis algorithm.

But PageRank is more complex than meats the eye... For starters there are two types of PageRank:

> First, there is the Real PageRank destined for Google use exclusively and...

> Secondly, there is the visible PageRank showing up with the PR Toolbar; this is used by webmasters and SEO developers to estimate Google's trust towards a given domain or webpage.

Although they have the same building principles - build quality back links, the real PageRank's values are much higher and can even reach millions.

In understanding the PageRank mechanism, you will learn that the Toolbar option catalogues web pages into eleven different levels.

Using, as an example, two web pages, one with a PageRank score of 2, and other with 4, the difference between them is not simply 2 in PageRank parlance, but is much, much higher.

Nobody truly knows just how it is that Google arrives at its PageRank rating of a web page, or what the exact values are from one level to the next.

Still, there is one insight that Google give us to how it calculates a webpage real PR:

Each toolbar PageRank level is exponentially greater than the one before it, thus being more difficult to achieve. In other words What was sufficient to go from PR2 to PR 3 level, won't be enough to go from PR3 to PR4.

Let's take a look at a few key points to help to gel the understanding of PageRank analysis in your mind:

1. Google doesn't analyze websites, it analyzes web pages.

2. The values listed on the PageRank Toolbar coincide with a wide range of real PageRank. This means that the real PageRank values can differ greatly or be close together for two consecutive toolbar PR levels of 1 and 2, for example.

3. In the ranking process an amount of back links that all originate from the one web domain, will be given a low PageRank rating of 1.

4. Every webpage has an initial, small PageRank refered to as (1-d), where d is a variable determined by Google named "damping factor" and when was first released it had a value of 0.85. This gives the initial real PageRank of every page a 0.15 value.

5. In order to advance on the PageRank Green grid you need to constantly build back links. This is an ongoing SEO task never to be abandoned.

6. Every quarter of the year PageRank Toolbar is updated. In between, Google updates the real PageRank on a continuous basis to provide up-to-date rankings. It's one of the reasons why some web pages with poor toolbar PageRank have better SERPs positions then other with superior figures.

7. Real PageRank is also programmed to analyze the link structure design of a web page.

After Google assembles a quantity of web pages within its index, it then rates them for integrity and popularity by assessing the quantity of links referring back to those pages. But there are other considerations too.

PageRank Dynamics in Action:

- Every webpage receives PageRank as other pages link to it. More and more, nofollow tags seem to be disregarded by some Search Engines like MSN and Yahoo, so there is no restriction to passing link juice.

- Links that originate from pages within the same website, or that originate from completely different websites are awarded similar ratings just as long as the other web pages have the same PageRank scores.

- Web pages are not penalized for linking with other pages. The rating is simply diverted to those other pages. This is because Google understand appropriate genuine outward linking, rather than attempts at PageRank counterfeiting.

- PageRank passed to other webpages is divided between the total number of links leaving the referring page.

- Finally, due to the damping factor, an incoming link is maximized at 85% of its value.

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Article Tags: google pagerank, how pagerank is calculated, pagerank, real pagerank, real pr, toolbar pagerank, toolbar pr



Related Forum Posts
Page Rank From Google Toolbar - The Google Toolbar gets the information from Google for each page you visit. Google PageRank changes periodically. If this page was created after the last PageRank update then typically you would have to wait until the next update before you would see a change in Toolbar PageRank.
Google Update - Has anyone seen an update in their PageRank? I have seen a number of websites get increases in their Google PageRank today and while mine is holding steady I'm hoping that some of the forum members have seen some increases!
Re: A little SEO humor - Here's one that made me smile: Old SEOs never die, they just lose their rankings.
Alexa, Google - Hi Jen, Alexa is not perfect by any stretch... but it is the best tool available to get a sense of where you rank - unless you have another idea in mind? Barbara, Google's update happened in the beginning of March and I tested out a few changes on my site through March and April before figuring out the right changes to make. The past 2 weeks have been some of my best so far but it also coincides with the recent PageRank update that Google has put out. Perhaps your site lost some PageRank scoring with the recent update.
Re: A little SEO humor - Why do they bury SEOs 20 feet under? Because deep down, they’re really good people. A little black humour. I think many of these are based on Lawyer jokes.


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