All you ever need to know about Pagerank!

Do you Google? I am sure you do since a million of people use Google daily. In fact, Google Company became so popular in the past ten years that Google became a verb. In modern world, to google means to search the web by using Google Search.

Everybody uses it but almost nobody knows the way that it works. Google PageRank is one of the most important methods, which Google uses to evaluate a website’s importance on the web. But what is PageRank? How is it calculated? What factors have impact on PageRank and what factors do not have any impact on it? This article is going to answer all the above questions including many more, to satisfy your desire to know the way PageRank really works.

What Is PageRank?

Originally Posted by Wikipedia

“PageRank is a link analysis algorithm that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set.”

How Is Pagerank Calculated?

Google PageRank is calculated by the following formula:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn))

“PR” stands for PageRank.
“A” is page of a website that is being calculated.
“t1” and “tn” are the pages that link to “A”.
“C” is the number of outgoing links on “A”.
“d” is the damping factor, and its value is 0.85

It’s worth noticing that Google distributes established PageRank of a website to its outgoing links. In other words, if you had a PR 7 website with one link on it, the linked website would get good amount of PR value. However, if you had seventy links on that PR 7 website, then the linked sites would get only a percentage of what the linked site got before. Therefore, you may conclude from it that it’s much better to get a link on PR 5 site, which has no links on it at all, then to get a link on PR 8 site, which has eighty links on it.

Each PageRank level is harder to reach then previous one. It takes only a few steps and little resources, time and money, to get PageRank from 0 to 3. While it takes a lot more to get higher PRs. Therefore, one is wrong who assumes that if he is able to achieve PR 3, he is capable of achieving another PR 3 and thus getting total of PR 6 for his precious website.


The diagram above shows that each PageRank level is harder to get.

(source - einfach-persoehnlich)

Interesting Facts About Calculating PageRank:

• Google does not assign PR value to a website but it assigns it to the individual pages of that website.

• Google PageRank is calculated constantly, but Google Toolbar is updated every there month, that’s when we notice the PR update.

• Links don’t give PR away, all they give are votes. For example, when a website links to another website, its own PR is not taken away it just gives a vote.

What Factors Have Impact On PageRank?

It’s very interesting that the process of adding new pages can decrease the PR value. This happens because existing pages will suffer by losing their PR value to new pages. It’s worth noticing that large sites, with a lot of pages and information, are less likely to notice significant PR change then small sites with less pages and information.

Links from related and high quality sites are more important then links from other sites. Link from a quality site shows that you site is important and is worth having good PR value.

Always remember, that you site can be banned if it links to banned sites. So always do the research and determine if you link to a banned site or not. To determine if a site is banned or not use this tool.

It’s a well known myth that the higher PageRank you will have the greater the chance of getting top positions in search engines. Google examines content of a website and displays most relevant website and its content for the searched keyword. For example, phplddirectory.com is the first in Google for the term “phpld directory” with PR 2, while phplinkdirectory is second with PR 7.

What Factors Have No Impact On PageRank?

Updating content more frequently is not going to increase PageRank. In fact, Google will send crawlers more often to crawl your website but it’s not going to increase your PR value. What really matters for PageRank value are links but not regular content.

Sub categories of a website do not necessarily have lower PR then root categories since PR is assigned to all pages separately. For example, if you have a directory, its submit page (for example, domain.com/submit.php) might have higher PR because more links are pointed to that URL.

Meta-Tags do not increase your PageRank. Meta-Tags are used to help search engines determine what a site is about and its related keywords. But, Meta-Tags do not increase PageRank value while backlinks do.

No follow links do not increase your PageRank as well. No follow links are used just to link to certain website. Bloggers use nofollow links a lot because it helps users and it tells search engines that the link with nofollow attribute should not be indexed.

Ranking Factors:

Anchor text is one of the most important ranking factors. The more specific the reference to a website is, the higher positions that site can achieve in the major search engines.

Headers, such as <H1>, are also important ranking factors. Google gives more value to a title with headers tags (H1, H2…H6) rather then to title with no tags at all.

Helpful Tools:

PageRank Checker

Check a website's Google PageRank on major Google datacenters instantly.

Google PageRank Prediction

This predictor tool does what it says, it predicts your future Google PageRank.

Google PageRank Notifier

This script will send you an email whenever the PageRank of the given page changes.

Google Pagerank Inspector

Google PageRank inspector is PHP scripts that can seek your entire website, include out linked page or not, and display Pagerank value for each of your website pages.