Page Rank: The Basics

Page rank is a term that many of us throw around without truly understanding.  Everyone uses it but no one really understands how it truly works. Billions of pages exist and millions are generated daily and the search issue is more complex than you probably think. Pared down to the basics, it’s a numerical value that indicates the importance of any page on the Web.  It’s an algorithm named after Larry Page, the name of its developer and one of the founders of Google.  This algorithm used by Google web search engine ranks websites in their search engine results. Page Rank is one of hundreds of factors used to determine search results.  But how does it work? 

Pages that are more “important” carry more weight than pages that are deemed as less important.  You may wonder if it really matters to your business and the answer is yes, it does!  Page rank is an important factor as it relates to a site’s ranking in the overall organic search results. Plus websites in the top three organic positions on Google receive over 58 percent of all clicks from Web users according to a study from Optify.

The rank of a page is determined by three factors; the first is the number of pages linking to your page. The next is the Page Rank of the pages linking to your page. The third is the total number of outgoing links from the pages linking to your web page. 

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You gain the most Page Rank boost from pages that have high page rank themselves and link to only a few other websites.  Incoming links from pages of low page rank with many outbound links boost your pages page rank – as long as you don’t link back to them. 

As the Internet grows, the scales that determine Page Rank constantly evolve.  This results in changes in a page’s Page Rank, where the measures will increase or decrease for no apparent reason.  Called the “Google dance”, this phenomenon is just another reason why it’s essential to continually build your site by adding fresh content and to work on building the site’s number of inbound links from other highly ranked sites.

The reason Google works is simply because it relies on the millions of people who post links on website to verify which other sites afford valuable content.  Google then assesses the significance of every web page with the use of several techniques.

Fun Fact: Page Rank is derived from the name of its developer Larry Page.  He’s one of the founders of Google. 

Hopefully this info provided some clarity about what it is and does.  Remember that Page Rank tells the importance of a page in relation to other pages. It’s just one of many factors that determine ranking in the search results.