Wednesday, January 28, 2009

Tell Me What is Your PageRank

By Irmin J. Roybal

Tell me what is your PR, and I will tell you where you are. (ancient maxim, slightly rephrased)

The concept of PageRank (or PR) was developed at Stanford University, implemented by Google and now this way or another is used by majority of search engines. PR varies from 1 to 10 (no fractions) and by definition is a measure of an importance of a web page.

PR is a way to characterize link popularity of a page. Clearly, the more in-links the page gets, the more chances are that the customer directed to that page by a search engine will be satisfied. In spite of a complex algorithm for calculation of PR, one can easily estimate it in the following terms. In general, the more your page is getting in-links from sites of high PR and other pages of your site, the higher will be PR of your page.

Consider the following example. Home page of Site 1 has PR 4 and 40 outbound links, of which one leads to your home page. While index page of Site 2 has PR 3 and 3 out-links, of which one points at your site home page. Which site passes to your index page higher PR? Site 2, because in spite of a lower rank, PR of this site is divided by only three links, and hence more PR will be given to your site from this link.

PR is assigned to every page of a site, however, home page usually has the highest PR. This is simply because home page is usually the most linked page. Of course, exceptions are possible, when you have inside your site a popular article or some very active sub-domain.

You can determine PR for any pages using Google Toolbar in a browser, or through service sites, of which I would recommend My Google PageRank com (I have no affiliation with them, just a neat site:). Of course, the higher PR of your page, the higher probability that it will be listed on top of search results. Here are some examples of high-PR sites: Wikipedia PR 9, Amazon PR 9, eBay Sitemap PR 7, Google Home got PR 8.

PR is important, but for the same time it is only one of several critical parameters used in search algorithms. From my own experience a site with PR 4 devoted to a narrow niche can already steadily keep all first positions in search results of Google and Yahoo on practically all major keywords. If you will find that your pages are assigned modest 0 " 2 PRs, dont fret, it is just an indicator that you need more work on your site. Posting articles in blogs and directories, adding unique content to your site and collecting inbound links from related to your niche sites will do the best for improvement of your pages PR.

So good luck, I wish you 10!

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