What is PageRank?

Google PageRank is the method Google use to determine and rank the importance of a web page on the Internet.  It is an 11 point scale, from 0 to 10 where 10 is the highest and reserved for the most important web page and websites.  At this point in time there are only 2 web pages, both being the home pages of www.google.com and www.usa.gov that are ranked with a PageRank 10.

If you will, imagine these 2 websites at the top level of a pyramid, on the next level down, a PageRank 9, there are roughly 8x as many websites as the previous level.  This pyramid continues all the way down to a PageRank 0, where there are roughly 55 billion web pages.  For those with some interest in mathematics PageRank is a logarithmic scale of roughly a base 8.

How is PageRank calculated?

PageRank is essentially an ever-running tally score of the strength and importance of every single web page within its index.  In order to calculate this strength, Google employ a voting system, where links are votes.  When a page links to another page, this is interpreted as a vote and it passes on some level of strength to the target or linked page.

The amount of strength passed on to the target page is dependent on the linking page PageRank, the amount of links on that page and some other variables.  For example, a link from the local butcher would hold little weight when compared to the weight a vote from The President of The United States holds.  So, more important and high PageRank pages pass on more PageRank, strength and importance to the pages they link to.

Let’s take the example of the homepage on your website.  Googlebot will scan the Internet for weeks and weeks, all the time finding new links to your home page from various other web pages on the Internet.  Of course some links will disappear so Google will also factor this into the equation.  While Googlebot is scanning the Internet any links to your homepage are tallied up on your PageRank homepage tally chart.

At many points in time, on a rolling tally, which is hidden from the public, Google will re-calculate the strength of your home page based on these links and their individual strengths.

You have to imagine this on a grand scale, being performed for every single web page in the Google search index.

Does PageRank make my site list higher in the search results?

PageRank does not equate to number one position for a given search query, otherwise usa.gov and Google.com would be number one for everything, wouldn’t they?

In short, PageRank is one of over 200 criteria used to rank a web page for a search query.  It is certainly part of the Google algorithm, as it is a measure of importance, BUT it is certainly not the only factor and it contributes less than other more important factors.