Published on May 28th, 2019
What is Google PageRank?
It is a mathematical algorithm which helped Google to become the search giant. It evaluates the quality and quantity of links to a webpage. This evaluation helps it to determine a relative score of the page’s importance and authority.
While PageRank was removed from the Toolbar in 2016, it still forms an important part of the overall ranking algorithm, and thus is worthwhile to understand.
Though PageRank is not public, it still exists. That is why you need to understand how PageRank really works. This knowledge is essential for that kind of optimization where an SEO clearly sees what exactly has to be done to get a result as well as what has gone wrong when the ranks dropped.
The PageRank score can be calculated using a simple iterative algorithm, and it corresponds to the principal eigenvector of the normalized link matrix of the web. It means that it is possible to calculate the score of a particular page without knowing the value of other pages that link to it.
Now, PageRank is only one factor in the Google ranking algorithm. Google uses a complex algorithm of over 200 ranking factors. One of these factors is known as PageRank. It’s important to remember that a high PageRank does not guarantee high rankings, but it can significantly help.
When Site A links to your web page, Google sees this as Site A endorsing or casting a vote for, your page. Google takes into consideration all of these link votes (i.e., the website’s link profile) to draw conclusions about the relevance and significance of individual webpages and your website as a whole. This is the basic concept behind PageRank.
Let Us Understand The Basic Concept Of PageRank:
What Is A PageRank?
PageRank is a numeric value that shows the importance of a particular page on a website. The importance of a certain page depends on the votes it gets from other pages on the web. By votes, I refer to the inbound links directed to the page. Search Engines like Google identifies each link as a vote.
The more votes or inbound links a specific page has, the more Google will mark it as an important page. However, Google identifies first the importance of the page casting the vote or giving the inbound link. This way, Google can determine how important or how valuable the vote or the link is. The “vote importance” is taken into consideration when computing the PR of a particular web page.
Page Rank is one way of determining the page’s importance. This is necessary since the page rank of a particular page contributes much on the page’s ranking in the search engines’ results. Page Rank is oftentimes referred to as merely “PR”.
Determining Page Rank
To determine the PR of a particular page, you must install the Google toolbar in your browser. With this toolbar, you will be able to see the PR of every page you open. As you may have noticed, PR ranges from 0-10. This numeric value gauges each page’s importance and value.
There are cases, however, when Google toolbar shows PR of a page which has not been indexed yet. How does this happen? It happens when one or more pages of a website have already been indexed, Google calculates the page’s rank. The PR value for those pages which are not yet indexed is allocated on the fly, just for your toolbar, although the pages have no actual rank yet.
Identifying the PageRank of web pages is necessary especially if you intend to employ the linking technique in your optimization process. Why? This is to avoid linking on a page that has no actual PR. Before you start linking to other pages, make sure that the page you are linking to is already indexed by Google.
Altogether, understanding PageRank is easy. It is only one of the number of ways to identify your page’s importance. However, it is still an imperative factor to understand in order to do better in the internet business.
