Google PageRank: what do you need to know about it

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

- 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')

- 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).

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.

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?