PageRank how important is your website?
PR stands for Public Relations. It also stands for Proportional
Representation. But in the world of internet marketing, PR means
PageRank. And it is the key to successful exploitation of the internet.
So what is it and what does it do? First the technical bit:
The
PageRank algorithm (a sequence of instructions, basically) was
originally created at Stanford University by Larry Page hence it is
called PageRank, or at least that’s what it says in The Google Story,
by David Vise and Mark Malseed (2005).
What is it for?
Google assigns to your web page an importance in the form of a
numeric representation (from 0 to 10), 10 being the highest value.
There are not many PR10 sites, but here is a list of some of them from
which you’ll see that a PR10 site is pretty important.
Adobe - http://www.adobe.com/
World Wide Web Consortium - http://www.w3.org/
Google Search http://www.google.com
National Science Foundation - http://www.nsf.gov
The White House - http://www.whitehouse.gov
US Government website - http://www.usa.gov/
So
the real question is how does it work? Well in simple terms Google
thinks that when one page links to another page, it is casting a "vote"
for that other page. The more "votes" a page has, the more important
the page.
What makes it more interesting is that not all
"voters" are equal. The importance of the page that's casting the vote
determines how important the vote itself is. So the higher the PR of
the page that's casting the vote, the more that vote is worth to your
page.
It’s a bit like The X Factor on TV: A vote from Simon
Cowell carries a lot more weight in the music business than a vote from
Cheryl Cole. Below is a more technical explanation for those of you who are that way inclined. If you’re not, skip on a paragraph or two!
Mathematical PageRanks (out of 100) for a simple network:
(PageRanks
reported by Google are rescaled logarithmically). Page C has a higher
PageRank than Page E, even though it has fewer links to it: the link it
has is much higher valued.
A web surfer who chooses a random
link on every page (but with 15% likelihood jumps to a random page on
the whole web) is going to be on Page E for 8.1% of the time. (The 15%
likelihood of jumping to an arbitrary page corresponds to a damping
factor of 85%.)
Without damping, all web surfers would eventually end
up on Pages A, B, or C, and all other pages would have PageRank zero.
Page A is assumed to link to all pages in the web, because it has no
outgoing links.
Source: Wikaepedia
Welcome back to the non-tech world, dear readers.
Simply
put, the more links a page has going out the less valuable those links
become to the site they are linking to. So if you have one link going
from a PageRank 3 page to your website that is a good link.
If
you had a link to your site from a PageRank 8 page, but there are 100
other links from this page, you would be sharing the link value of that
page with 100 other sites meaning the PR3 page would actually be a
better vote for your site. Where as the more links you have coming into
a page, the higher that page’s PageRank will become.
PageRank is
also affected by the internal linking structure of your website. This
works very much like the external links calculation above. Each
internal page has a PageRank that can be used to vote for other pages
on your website.
This
is why contextual linking is so important, the more links to an
internal page from other internal pages the better. For example:
FIG 1: All pages in this example would have the same PR
FIG 2: This example would give A the highest PR but B and C would be
weak as they are leaking PR with no internal linking to make it up
FIG 3: This linking example would give A a high PR with B the second
highest PR and C would end up being a weak PR page
So
as you can see, link strategies can be quite complex. Another factor in
this scenario is that the more pages you have on a site the more pages
that can vote for other internal pages. So the more pages you have, the
higher your site’s PageRank can become.
Outbound links from your
page leak PageRank. There are a few ways of stopping this from
happening. The best way is to use the rel=”nofollow” attribute e.g. link text. This will tell Google not to pass any of your page’s rank to the linked page.
Google
will still actually follow the link and if the page it is linked to it
in Google’s directory, it will still reindex the page. This attribute
is commonly used on Blog sites to stop spam blogging (where people post
blogs or entries on forums, guest books, wikis etc. with links to
commercially promote their site and help generate additional PR for
their site.)
In summary:
PageRank is Google's way
of deciding how important your website is. 0 is the lowest PageRank,
while 10 is the highest. A higher PageRank can seriously affect your
search engine position.
The more links from high PageRank pages
your site has, the greater its importance in Google. The more links
internally to your pages, the more important certain pages on your site
will be.
