Saturday, September 23, 2006

What is Page Rank, and Will it Effect My Website Ranking?

Through some of my other SEO posts, I've had quite a few questions about Google's page Rank (PR). What is it? How does it work? Why don't I have any? Does it affect my site's ranking?, etc.

What is it?: In short, PR is a system that Google uses to weigh the importance of a website. It is based almost entirely on incoming links, and the importance of those links. Each website is given a "rank", 0-10. The easiest way to see your rank and the rank of others is to install a toolbar on your browser. You can download them here: Firefox or Internet Explorer

How Does it Work?: There have been many speculations as to the actual algorithm used to calculate PR... but for our purposes, we don't need to get too into details. Basically, each site is assigned a weight or rank based on incoming links from other sites that are also ranked. Based on the rank of those incoming links, your site will be assigned a certain rank. Sites are also ranked based on the number of incoming links. If you have thousands of incoming links, your PR will go higher simply by brute force.

  • Example 1: If you have 20 incoming links, and all the links are from websites that only have a page rank of 2 or lower, your sites PR will not exceed 2.
  • Example 2: If you have 20 incoming links, 5 with page a page rank of 4, 5 with a pr of 3, and 10 with a PR of 2, your rank will probably be around a 3.
  • Example 3: PR is evenly distributed. If you have a page with a PR of 5, and there are 50 outgoing links on that page, the pages that you are linked to won't get as much PR weight assigned to them because that PR 5 is being distributed across 50 other pages. But if you have a PR 5 page that has only 3 outgoing links, those pages will get a big chunk of that PR weight.
Here is a very simple chart that shows how PR is distributed:



Now that you are thoroughly confused, I'll try to give you some more insights into PR:
  1. In general a link from a site with a PR 5 is better than a link from a PR 4.
  2. In general, a site that is nearly identical to another site, but has a higher PR will rank better in Google.
  3. If you have a PR of 8 or better, you are on your way to Search Engine Nirvana
  4. When you get into the range of PR 8 and higher it is almost always because there are a very large number of links coming in to the site. It is almost impossible to acheive a high rank from a few high ranking PR sites being linked to you. Higher PR pages will have many thousands of incoming links, and will achieve a high PR based on "brute force", as mentioned before.
  5. If you can help it, try not to get links from pages that have a PR of 0, or from pages that make your PR toolbar grayed out. When the toolbar is grey, it is usually because that page has not been given a PR because it's not in the index, or it may have been penalized for something and thus is not assigned a PR as punishment.
  6. If you don't have a rank yet, don't worry, it will come as you naturally get more incoming links. There isn't anything you need to do to start getting a PR. As long as you are in the index, you will be fine... if you don't know if you are, just do a search for your domain name in google. If you aren't, please don't submit your site to Google... they hate that. All you need to do is get one incoming link from a site that is indexed, and then your entire site will be crawled.
  7. According to Google and Matt Cutts, PR is updated every couple of weeks, but the changes are only made public about every 3 months. So, most of the time, what you are seeing on the toolbar is probably not accurate for the present time.
  8. Pay attention to the number of outgoing links on pages that link to your site. Fewer outgoing links is almost always better. This has to do with the distribution of PR. Fewer links means more PR weight to your site.
  9. When you are building your own site, pay attention to your linking structure. Make sure that you link back to your home page (or the page that you want to have higher PR) on every page of your site. If possible, use javascript to hide your links so that the PR is directed in a more focused way.
  10. Now to contradict alot of what I've just said... ;-) .... don't pay too much attention to PR. According to statements made by Google and many SEO experts in the last year or so, PR doesn't play as much of a role as it used to in ranking sites. Google found that it was just too easy to manipulate. This included things like people purchasing links specifically based on their PR.
  11. So, based on the above, yes PR is important, and it does play a role in ranking, but don't lose any sleep over it. In my opinion, page rank is a good tool to show how good a site is in general. Sites will usually have a higher PR based on length of operation, number of links, number of quality links, etc.

Whew.... that was alot harder to explain that I thought it would be. Since I'm not the most articulate person around, you may want to consider some other outside reading. Here is what I recommend:

Google's Definition
Wikipedia's Definition
For the technically inclined: link 1, link 2, link 3
For the Beginner: link 1, link 2, link 3

Please comment if you have any questions or.... comments.

Here is a great link for the work at home professional

posted by Justin Smith @ 9/23/2006 03:35:00 PM

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