PageRank: Some Basics

By Irmin J. Roybal | January 16, 2009

Tell me what is your PR, and I will tell you where you are. (slightly rephrased old Russian maxim)

The concept of PageRank (or PR) was developed at Stanford University, implemented by Google and now this way or another is used by majority of search engines. PR varies from 1 to 10 (no fractions) and by definition is a measure of an importance of a web page.

The purpose of a search engine is to give to its customer the most relevant search results. Here comes the utility of PR, an optimization on site quality, so the best sites will be offered on top of search results. High link popularity of a site is clearly a merit and PR is its measure. In general, the more inbound links are coming to the page and the higher PR of the source pages, the higher will be PR of this given page.

Here is an example. Site Alpha of PR 3 has twenty out-links in its home page, while site Beta of PR 2 has two out-links in its index page. Each site has one link pointing to your site home page. Which site will give to your home page higher PR? The answer is Beta. In spite of lower PR, the rank of Beta index page is distributed between smaller number of outbound links (2 vs. 20 in Alpha), which delivers higher PR to your index page.

PR is assigned to every page of a site, however, index page usually has the highest PR. This is simply because index page is usually the most linked page. Of course, exceptions are possible, when you have inside your site a popular article or some very active sub-domain.

You can determine PR for any pages using Google Toolbar in a browser, or through service sites, of which I would recommend My Google PageRank com (I have no affiliation with them, just a neat site:). Of course, the higher PR of your page, the higher probability that it will be listed on top of search results. Here are some examples of high-PR sites: Wikipedia PR 9, Amazon PR 9, eBay Sitemap PR 7, Google Home got PR 8.

PR is important, but for the same time it is only one of several critical parameters used in search algorithms. From my own experience a site with PR 4 devoted to a narrow niche can already steadily keep all first positions in search results of Google and Yahoo on practically all major keywords. If you will find that your pages are assigned modest 0 ” 2 PRs, dont fret, it is just an indicator that you need more work on your site. Posting articles in blogs and directories, adding unique content to your site and collecting inbound links from related to your niche sites will do the best for improvement of your pages PR.

Good luck and all the tens to your PR!

For more info, please, visit : Fortunes Web, a site which caters to your web business prosperity. There you can ask Irmin any questions on web money, search engine optimization, getting free internet traffic, online advertizing, and more.

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