Better Understanding of Google's PageRank

Page Rank is an essential part in the Search Engine Optimization Process. It determines the importance of a particular page on a website. PR (Page Rank) may seem complicated to understand especially when you try to look into the mathematical formulas involved in computing it. However, if you start knowing how PR works, you will soon realize that it is something easy to comprehend.

What is a Page Rank?

Page Rank 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 page rank of web pages is necessary especially if you intend to employ 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 Page Rank 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.

Find out how we can help you achieve a higher PageRank, please check our SEO Services or contact our SEO Specialists.