The Beginner's Guide To Understanding Google PageRank

By: Richard Weber

Let me ask you: If you have a certain idea or topic in mind, and you wish to find out more about this topic, what do you do? Ten years ago you would probably have gone to the library, but today... You GOOGLE IT!

If you take anybody currently living in the modern world, chances are that is what they will tell you. Google is King! Over the course of just a few years, Google has gone from a couple of smart guys at Stanford University with the revolutionary idea of making the entire internet available from their desktop, to being the undisputed gatekeeper to nearly every single portion of humanity's collective knowledge.

The Google search engine has in fact become so popular and proliferous that the word 'google' itself has now become a verb! (As in, if you want to find out more about a certain person, you just google them.)

Every time you do a search, you will see the term or phrase that you searched at the top, followed by about ten webpages that Google thinks are most relevant to your term. Since there are literally tens of millions of Google searches every single day, it is not a great leap to think that the websites that manage to get their ranking very high in Google will get ALOT of free visitors and traffic.

But what is it exactly that determines which websites get listed in the top ten listings? Well, the system that is behind every single search result that you see is called the PageRank system, named after its creator and co-founder of Google, Larry Page.

Before the PageRank system, there did exist some other methodologies for determining web search relevance and delivering accurate results, but none of them were as robust, accurate, democratic, or resistant to human error as PageRank.

-What Puts PageRank in A League of Its Own-

There are basically two major ideas behind the PageRank system that have made it so revolutionary:

First, the PageRank system is rather democratic in nature because every time one website (we will call it site A) links to some different website (we will call it site B), that link is considered to be a 'vote' by site A that site B has good information, or for some reason is worthy of being viewed and read. This concept of the democratic nature of the links found all over the internet is a vital main idea behind the PR system.

Second (and this is the part that really put PageRank on the level), NOT ALL LINKS ARE CREATED EQUAL!

That is to say that if you have two links coming to your website, one from Forbes.com and another from some backwater, fly-by-night dot com, these two links will not be treated equally.

So what does this mean for the question of how did the highest ranked sites get where they are? They have been around for long enough to have numerous popular sites link to them, they have valuable, relevant, dynamic content, and chances are that they probably link to other related websites.

Another vital (but not so revolutionary) mechanism behind determining which webpages are displayed for certain keywords is an advanced text-matching system. Google's text-matching system is able to deliver highly relevant webpages because of the vast computing power behind the Google search engine itself.



-Technical Explanation of a Website's PageRank-

This following part is a technical explanation for those who want to further understand the nature of the PageRank algorithm. If you are only interested in learning how to improve your own site's PR, then feel free to skip to the next section.

With the PageRank algorithm, every single website on the internet is given a numerical PR value somewhere between 1 and 10, with 10 being the best. It will help if you can remember from your math class what a logarithm is, because the assignment of a certain PR number is logarithmic in nature, similar to the Richter scale of measuring earthquakes.

This is important to understand, especially if you want to increase your own PageRank. In terms of PageRank, this means that a PR6 site is not twice as valuable as a PR5 site, but actually TEN TIMES as valuble. This would approximately mean that a single incoming link from a PR6 site would be give you the same amount of value as a few dozen links from PR4 sites. Notice that a PR6 incoming link will NOT give the value of 100 PR4 links, because PageRank is concerned with the quantity of incoming links as well as how important they are.

-Tips For Improving The PR of Your Site or Blog-

Try to create content that is valuable, funny, or for some reason really makes people want to link to it. This strategy will increase your number of incoming links without any extra work, which will thereby increase the PageRank of your site or blog.

A 'link farm' is a website that has hundreds or thousands of incoming and outgoing links. Sites like this can actively inflate PageRank to make a site seem more relevant than it actually is, so Google will 'punish' websites associated with link farms by bringing them down in the search rankings.

Do not worry or feel like your site or blog is not good enough if after just a few months or so you do not have a high PageRank and are not listed very high in the search results. It takes time to build PR, so the better your content and the longer you have been online, the better chance you have at naturally gaining a higher PR.

See if you can find a few high-quality websites or blogs out there related to your own site topic, and contact the owner to see is they would be interested in linking to your site if you link to theirs. This is called 'link exchanging,' and if you do it to much then Google may 'punish' you becase this is another way of inflating PR, but exchanging links with a few quality sites will help you.

One last thing, and this has been stressed throughout the article, there really is a single golden rule that you can apply to boost your PageRank: create MASSIVELY VALUABLE information and content that people will naturally want to link to on their own, and you are set.