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Page Rank
What exactly is PageRank? There's a surprisingly simple answer: it is Google's way of estimating how important a web page is. On a basic level, Google decides that if one page links to another, the second page must be considered important. If one page on one site has 15,000 pages linking to it, it must be for a good reason, right?
Page Rank is About Pages, Not Websites
First of all, PageRank is assigned on a page-by-page basis. A whole website does not have this score, and different pages within a site can have very different PageRank values assigned. Another important point is that the rating (out of ten) assigned is essentially little more than an approximation of a given page's PageRank. The actual values cover a far greater range than zero to ten.
PageRank is only one factor that Google takes into account when displaying the results of a search. There are still other factors of equal significance in performing well on Google - so don't make the mistake of thinking that you would live happily ever after if your PageRank was a little bit higher. Other factors include a page's title, and the use of keywords within the page's text - not in the keyword meta tag.
PageRank is still one of Google's more ingenious strategies, and is certainly one of the many reasons that it stands head and shoulders above the rest. Partly, this is due to a combination of two factors. First is that the very nature of PageRank is difficult (but not impossible) to manipulate, and secondly that the exact details of how the value is assigned is a closely guarded
secret.
However, there is one very useful source of data - an academic paper detailing the formula used to calculate PageRank from Google's early beginnings as a
university project. This formula will have certainly been altered and expanded over the years, but it is generally accepted that it still represents the essence of their PageRank system.
The Page Rank Formula
The exact details are lengthy, and far beyond what is discussed below. But the basic formula is as follows:
PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ….. + PR (Tn)/C(Tn))
PR(A) is the PageRank of a particular page (A) - not a website as a whole.
1-d is the dampening factor, as explained below.
PR(T1) is the PageRank of the page that links to our (A) page, and C(T1) is the number of links contained on that same page.
The formula is repeated throughout every single page that contains a link to this (A) page.
Two important points to take into account. First of all, if you're thinking that the formula would in practice be an infinite loop, then you're correct. This is the very nature of the web itself, and is also why Google has introduced the so called dampening factor.
The second point concerns the way that PageRank is awarded by one page to another. The generally accepted means of understanding this is to consider that a given page has, according to its own PageRank, a certain amount of voting power. If the page in question links to five other pages, then each of the pages being linked to receive their PageRank "award" of one fifth of the original page's voting power. It's also worth noting that the number of links on a page includes a website's internal links.
Link Farms Don't Work
This makes it quite obvious that the so-called link farms, where each page of a website contains many hundreds of links in an attempt to artificially boost so called "link popularity", are doomed to fail from the start. In addition to this, Google has its own system for not only minimizing the effect that these sites have, but eliminating it altogether. As the formula shows, PageRank works as a multiplier of a site's overall value, so Google has made sure that link farms have their own value of zero - which means that a link from them counts for nothing, quite literally.
There is a scare story doing the rounds which claims that being listed on link popularity sites, or for that matter any site with a large number of links, can get your site penalized or even banned from Google. This is simply not the case. If it were, you'd effectively be able to wipe-out your competition's Google presence with one afternoon's work. It doesn't work that way.
Having links to your web pages on sites with a low page rank and a large number of links means that the benefits are quite effectively minimized to zero. But this will not detract from your current PageRank at all.
Summary
PageRank is undoubtedly an important factor in how much traffic you will
receive from Google. It is, however, merely one component in your
arsenal of tools to win the battle for one particular search engine.
Even with the constantly evolving web, and the ever-tightening systems
employed by the search engines to quantify the usefulness of a website,
content is still by far the most important factor, and will invariably
be the base on which everything else is built.
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eSavvy
Online Marketing