by Tolovaj
Google PageRank (some wrongly call it page rank) is pretty controversial theme. Every page on the web has its own PageRank and a lot of webmasters seek to increase it as high it is possible. But many claim it is outdated factor which looses its importance from month to month.
Who is right? What exactly is PageRank (PR)? How to check your PR? How to increase it? How is PR calculated?
Here are top 10 things you should know about PageRank!
(Image credit: clker.com)
1. Google PageRank is a measure of authority of every single page on the internet. It was initially calculated by relatively simple formula (but times are changing) used for measuring importance of articles in scientific publications with this logic:
- if article A is quoted in article C and article B is quoted in articles C and D, we have a ground to believe article B is more important (authoritative) than article A
 More backlinks means more authority |
- if article E is quoted by less important (authoritative) article A and article F is quoted by more important (authoritative) article B, we have a ground to believe article F is more important than article E (he has more 'powerful vote')
 More authoritative pages links to your page, higher authority you get |
- if we substitute article with web page, we can compare authorities of web pages on the same premisses.
2. PageRank is Google's trademark. It is named after one of his authors: Larry Page. So Page in name is not connected to web page, it is really connected to the name of real person.
3. PageRank (not page rank) is calculated for every page (like http://www.pravljice.org/pravljice/o-pravljicah/wilde-saloma-pravljice), not site (like http://www.pravljice.org) on the web. It can have one of numbers from 0 to 10, where 0 represents lowest and 10 represents highest authority.
You can also note main site in this example has PR 2 and page under this site has PR 4. This is not a typical case, but is not too rare either.
PageRank 10 is reserved for only few pages in the whole world (this is example of page with millions of authoritative backlinks: http://get.adobe.com/reader).
4. There are numerous ways to check your PR:
- free on-line PR checkers, for instance http://www.prchecker.info
- free programs for PR check, like "Rank me V3.0.exe" (this checker is great, it is free, it does not need installation and it can check every single page what many add-ons can't)
- add-ons for browsers, some call them prcheckers, just type "PageRank checker for Mozilla" or "PR check for Chrome", or something like that depending on your browser.
 Let's check some PageRanks! clker.com |
There are also tons of so-called SEO tool bars for browsers out there and pagerank tool is integrated in every one of them.
5. You will hear two fat lies about PageRank:
- PageRank is most important factor in the world.
- PageRank is not important at all and you should forget everything about it.
The truth is in between. PageRank (PR) was only few years ago so important the owner of the page with higher PR always ranked better than the owner of page with lower PR if they competed for same keyword in search engine rankings. But PageRank is only one of more than 200 factors by which a decision of search engine is made and it is constantly loosing its weight from one update to another.
This doesn't mean PageRank is not important. Typical example is site with PR 4 where you can expect a visit of search engine's bots every single day (or more times a day). With PR 0 you can wait for weeks, even months to get a visit and if you have fresh content on your site (you added new page, for example), you can wait for long time before your new page is indexed. Fortunatelly there are other techniques to accelarate indexing of your fresh pages.
Anyway: if you can choose between lower and higher PageRank for your site, high is always better! With higher PR you can also count more of your pages in single site will be indexed than with lower PR.
6. You should know there is one more possible PR status for your page. Not only from 0 to 10, but also 'not available', what means 'not calculated' and is displayed with - or N/A in your PR toolbar.
If you get this info, there is a chance this page is not indexed by Google. Or it is indexed, but PR not calculated and you have to wait until calculation is finished.
7. You need backlinks. Backlink is a link from other page pointing to your page. More backlinks you have and higher PR they have, better chance for you to have high PR on your page.
You will hear two more fat lies about PageRank:
- Some new pages (for example freshly opened blogs) can get PR higher than 0 even without backlinks. You can blame so called Google dance for that.
This is not true. When you publish new blog it will be probably shown somewhere. If we look for instance at wordpress.com, your blog can be shown after publishing for some time on first page and if it is indexed by bots just at the right time in the right place, it can get PR 5 or some similar undeserved number just on that trivial fact.
- You can get higher PR by adding fresh content, deleting duplicated content and checking your texts for typos.
This is just not the case either. PageRank is dependent on backlinks only. I have seen numerous pages breaking those rules, full of dead links and typos, without fresh content for years and so on, but still having PR 5 or 6. They only had powerful backlinks and this is it.
8. Nobody (I believe that includes Larry Page) can say for sure, how many links with certain authority you need to achieve certain PageRank on your page. Experiments show you need about 18 backlinks with PR 3 to have PR 3 on your site. You need about 5 backlinks from page with PR 4 or only 1 backlink from page with PR 5 to achieve the same authority.
9. Things complicate further because the strength of every backlink (what is related to passing authority from one page to another) is dependent of the number of backlinks on page from where backlink comes to your site. In web directories you can get easy backlinks but in company of thousand backlinks the authority you get is insignificant.
 Calculation of PageRank takes time clker.com |
10. Google tells us only when it already happened. It is typically four times a year, but you never know. Last update was February 4 2013, before that was November 7 2012, before was August 2, 2012 and before May 3, 2012. Next PR update was expected in the beginning of May, but now we are already in June and nothing happened. Maybe the Penguin changed the plans of PR updates and maybe it will be finally retired. Who knows?
Of course when you see PR update, you can't be sure what backlinks were counted and used in the calculation, what are already counted but not yet entered the equation and what backlinks are counted but for some reason will never be in the calculation. PR which can be seen at this very moment is always an outdated info!
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Image credit: Free printable calendars
Don't be obsessed with PR, but be good and try to increase your PageRanks of your pages however. After all PR is a measure of your success. Higher PR means more (quantity and quality counts) backlinks, and this means higher popularity. And we all want to be liked by others, don't we?
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What is highest PR of any of your pages right now?
Although PageRank is not as powerful indicator as it was several years ago, Google is very clear on his very short list of clear directions (there is also VERY long list of unclear directions).
Let' back to the short list. It says: "Don't sell PageRank from your pages." If nothing else, this clearly says PR is important and everybody who tried to reverse engineer their algo, can confirm that.
Interesting. I was aware of PageRank but had little clarity on how it all worked. This made it very clear. Thanks.
@RebeccaE, thanks for stopping by. Yes, authority is still the major factor on the web and although many people believe social activity will eventually replace the PR (which is only a part of equation), I really don't believe this can happen in near future. My tests clearly show PageRank is important and knowing about hundreds of thousands fake profiles made by SEO companies only convinced me to stick to PR. Frankly - will Google trust more to its algorithm or to fake profiles?
Just don't forget - only a part of equation!
thanks for clearing this up, you made it easy. I knew about PageRanks, but I wasn't as sure about the authority so the examples are a great reminder.
Well, it is not a big deal really. If you concentrate on getting relevant links to your landing pages, PR will come sooner or later. Search engines like links and they LOVE relevant links with authority (PR is part of that).
This is probably one of the writing online factors, that I have not taken into account yet. So I will be visiting this page to re-read and see what might help me to improve.
The biggest misunderstanding with PageRank is its interpretation. But it is actually simple. Because it is only a part of (secret) equation, we should never look only at PR of a page. This means nothing. But high PageRank (let's say 3 or more) and related content on page A can means a lot to page B if page A links to B. Page B can formally still have PR 0, but it can win in SERP for your kw thanks to the link coming from A.
And by the way - everybody should worry about PR, not too much, of course, just as part of the winning combination:)
I learned a few things from this article, Tolovaj. I tend not to worry much about PR, but see now how important the PR of a backlink can be. I have no idea what the PR of my individual pages are. I was under the impression that the PR of the overall site was the important part, but now I see that the individual pages are ranked independently. Oh, to get more traffic -- that I think is the key.
No, nobody (mere mortal) really knows the real PR of specific page. I have pages with PR5 and PR6 acting like PR0 and pages without visible PR (too new) with the power of PR4. But if you for instance have a page with PR3 which didn't change PageRank for a year or more and you control the most of the links, you are pretty safe to presume it is still PR3 at the moment.
It is expected to see new PageRanks in few weeks (two to three) and this value will be probably based on the PR of links in January.
I thought PR was updated in real time. I should say assumed. Learned something. Thank you.