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By Mark Sceats
PageRank, or Google PR, is Google’s method of measuring a page's "importance". It plays a key role in how highly a page is ranked in Google's search results for a given search term.
When two competing pages have identical 'on-page' relevancy for a search term, the page with the higher PR will be ranked highest. This means that you should try to boost the PR of your homepage and other key pages. The way to do this is by building inbound links.
PageRank is strongly influenced by both the number and quality of inbound links to a page. Relevant inbound links from pages with a high PageRank are far more valuable than those from pages with a lower PageRank.
In this regard PR is like a measure of a page's 'voting' power. A page with a PR of 5 has significantly more voting power than a PR 1 page. For this reason it's appropriate to target inbound links from other sites with high PageRank.
A point to note is that a page's PR voting power gets spread evenly across all the pages it links to (both internal pages & those of other websites).
If a page has a PR of 5 this is shared out amongst ALL the pages it links to.
This means that when you're looking at candidate pages you want linking to your site you need to not only consider their PR, but also the number of links they have already. If a page with a high PR has numerous links already then the amount of PR it can pass on by linking to your page may be lower than that of a lower PR page which has less links on it.
Whilst attracting links from other pages with high PageRank is beneficial it's more important that the pages linking to you are RELEVANT.
In their pursuit of links many website owners have exchanged reciprocal links with totally irrelevant websites, rather than those that are related to the theme of their website. Typically these websites have junky links pages filled with numerous irrelevant links to reciprocating sites. In response to this practice search engines like Google are increasingly discounting links that are not relevant.
PageRank for a webpage can be determine by using the Google toolbar which integrates into Internet Explorer (PC only). This can be downloaded free from here: Google Toolbar. Once installed, there will be a bar graph at the top of the browser showing a version of PageRank for the page you’re browsing. When you hold the mouse over the bar, you'll see a number from 0 to 10 as shown below.
PageRank isn't linear, it's logarithmic. The PR shown in the Google toolbar isn't the actual PR of the page, simply the integer value. Being a logarithmic scale means it's a lot harder to boost a page's PR from 5 to 6 than it is from 4 to 5.
Don't set your sites on getting PR9 or 10 pages. Very, very few pages achieve this. The Google.com homepage has a PR10 (funny that) but Yahoo.com only has a PR 9, as does the BBC homepage. If you're curious about what sort of pages are able to attain a PageRank of 10 in Google here's a list someone's drawn up: Google PageRank PR 10 List
Be aware that PageRank changes - Google used to update it monthly, however the publically displayed PageRank is now only updated sporadically every few months.
Here is a related article about the so-called "Google Sandbox" we recommend you read.
Next: Link Building
 
This
page last updated
September 17, 2007
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