Google Page Rank

There are two ways to explain what exactly Google PageRank is. There is the 'scientific' way with Algorithms and there is the layman's way of explaining.

In a nutshell, Google uses a formula, based largely on outgoing links, to determine how important your site is in comparison to others. The result is used as a display on a Google toolbar and also for search results. It is not necessarily based upon how popular your site actually is.

Using the Algorithms, a numeric value is assigned that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also of importance is the page that is casting the vote in determining how important the vote itself is.
Google calculates a page's importance from the votes cast for it via links. How important each vote is is taken into account when a page's PageRank is calculated.

Some links can cause a site to be penalized by Google. Links into your site cannot harm your site, but links from your site can be harmful if they link to penalized sites. So be careful which sites you link to. This is why link farms can be a bad thing.

Google wants you to know that PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that they believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

Google also uses Hypertext-Matching Analysis. Their search engine also analyzes page content. However, instead of simply scanning for page-based text (which can be manipulated by site publishers through meta-tags), their technology analyzes the full content of a page and factors in fonts, subdivisions and the precise location of each word. They also analyze the content of neighboring web pages to ensure the results returned are the most relevant to a user's query.

Most searchers encounter PageRank through the Google Toolbar. The toolbar has a "PageRank meter" that Google itself fails to fully explain in its online help files.


The number of links outbound from the website that links to you also determines the value of the link. A related website with 10 outbound links that links to you is much better than a related website with 100 outbound links that link to you. Other one-way inbound links from pages with high page rank but unrelated topics do help a little, but not nearly as much.