Google PageRank Explained Search Engine Tech

Google PageRank Explained: Google’s PageRank (PR) is one of the most valued and misunderstood web page attributes. The term PageRank was named after one of the founders of the Google search engine, Larry Page. PageRank was the technology that the Google search engine was built on.

The idea behind PageRank is that a link from one page to a page on another site was in a vote for the importance of that page. The idea behind this was that webmasters would only link to pages that contained useful information and would be of possible value to their viewers. Google used the number of inbound links to a page to calculate the importance and relevance of that specific page, and based on this calculation, and additional criteria, Google decides where to rank that page on their results page for a given search term.

The scale of Google’s measurement for PageRank is from 1 to 10 with 10 being the highest. The best way to check your PageRank is to download Google’s Toolbar on your web browser. The PageRank bar will show all or part of it colored green. Hold your mouse over the PR bar to determine your specific page rank. It is that simple.

How is PageRank Calculated?

PageRank is calculated by the sharing of PageRank value from all the inbound links to your page. Google also uses the internal links within a site in the calculation of PageRank. Each link to a page carries with it and passes the PageRank value to the target page. The value passed depends on the PageRank value of the page they come from, and the total outbound links from the page. Most analysts conclude that a page will pass about 85% of its value to the page it links to. A web page that has a PageRank of 6 (PR6) with one outbound link will pass 85% of the value of a PR6 page to the page it links to.

Internal links are also used in the total outbound link count. The value passed to any single page is 85% of the PageRank, divided by the total number of outbound links.

The majority of analysts believe that PageRank levels are logarithmic and not linear. So PR6 is not worth 25% more than a PR5, but may be worth 4 to 6 times more.

Not all PR6 ranked pages are equal. The PR value is not one number, but is a range of values.

Please remember that PageRank is Google’s way of deciding a page’s importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determine a page’s ranking in the search results. It isn’t the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.

Click on the link located below to find out what your Google PageRank is:

Calculate Your Google PageRank with Google’s Toolbar