Google PageRank Explained and its Importance

A member over on the Webmaster-Talk.com forums recently opened up a thread titled: Google Page Rank is not important.

Before I give my opinion on the subject I want to make sure you understand exactly what he meant by Google “Page Rank.”

In most cases when someone mentions Page Rank, they are not referring to a webpages actual keyword rankings in Google. For example, “my site ranks # 5 for keyword whatever.”

What they are referring to Google’s patented PageRank (also known as PR for short) system:

Quoted from From www.google.com/technology/

“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 more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; 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.”

What is your website’s Google Pagerank?
In order to see your site’s pagerank, you must have the Google Toolbar installed on your browser. The toolbar is of course free and can be downloaded here: http://toolbar.google.com

Place your mouse over the green bar under “pagerank” and that webpage’s numeric pagerank will show up.

The Toolbar only shows PageRank on a scale of 0 – 10 but is actually calculated using a complex logarithmic scale:
For Example:

Don’t panick if your PageRank is a 0 if you have a new site. At the time I write this, SEOoutline itself has a PageRank of zero. It takes time for Google to update and find the links pointing to a page on your website. It should also take time for you to gain new links to a page on your website (unless you are using some sneaky tricks that could come back to haunt you).

Looking at the scale above, you will see that it becomes several times harder to reach the next Toolbar PageRank than the previous (for example, let say you have worked on getting quality links into your site and you have brought your webpage PageRank from a PR 5 to a PR 6. It will will be several times harder to reach from PR 7 from a PR 6 than it was to go from your PR 5 to a PR 6.

However (as mentioned above), an incoming link to your site is consider as a “vote” for your site. This increases the PageRank and link popularity (number of incoming links) of your site.

But the weight of the “vote” given to your webpage depends on the PageRank of the the site that is linking TO your site. So what does this mean? The higher the PageRank of the site linking to you, the more PageRank you will be given.

For example, it might take fifty PageRank 5 links in order for you to reach a PageRank of 6, but it might only take ten PageRank 7 incoming links to also reach that PageRank of 6. So, if your goal is to reach a PageRank 6 for example, it is much easier to try and get a few incoming PageRank 7 sites than try and get a lot of PageRank 6’s or lower. These numbers are just an example and not specific.

How long will it take for your webpage PageRank to Update?

Google is running their own schedule, a schedule which changes often. PageRank now seems to update about once every three months. Yes, that can be frustrating.

I delibertly used the word “webpage” instead of “website” in this post. It is important to remember that PageRank is page specific . A website does not have a particular PageRank number. Webpages do.

How Important is your webpage(s) PageRank?

PageRank the number is really not important. The number does not mean you will always have a higher ranking in the search engines than another site for keywords. It does not mean it must be a high traffic website. It does not mean the website make any money. What is important are the elements that contribute to a higher Google PageRank.

Those elements include making useful content on your website which in the return may yield a gain of incoming links from other relevant sites. You can also gain PageRank from incoming links from non-relevant sites, but what’s the point other than a increasing that PR number your page has. You might gain from the anchor text benefit of an non-relevant link but that’s a whole other post and one that is becoming increasingly debatable.

Focus on quality content that other websites will want to link to and a higher PageRank will follow. Don’t worry about the “number.”

By SEO Outline on 03-20-2006