eMedia Daily

How Important is Google PageRank?

PageRank is a measure of how important a website is on the web - its a proprietary number assigned by the search giant… Google.

According to Google…

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.

Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

Based on this information, we know that we want a higher page rank, because it makes us feel important. It also affects where we appear in search results. This is important if you’re a site with a great deal of competition for your keywords, but may become less important as you move into niche markets.

So, how do you affect your PageRank?
- Employ basic SEO techniques and best practices to help the search engines find your content.
- Build link relationships with other sites that have relevant content, and high page ranks.
- Use a standard URL - no ghosting! If your page has www.domain.com and domain.com pointed to the same site, each may have a different PageRank based on the links going to each URL.
- Be patient! It takes longer to go from a 6 to a 7 than it does from a 4 to a 5. PageRank is built on an algorithm continuum, so the farther you move in the rankings, the more “important” you truly are.

Want to know more of the math behind how it works? Check out PageRank Explained from Web Workshop for one theory.