What is Google PageRank (PR)?

The whole concept behind the Internet is the ability for documents to provide hyperlinks to other documents. Google was the first search engine that defined how popular a particular website or document (web page) was by looking at how many other websites linked to it. It then ranked how popular this web site/page is by giving it a rating between 0-10, 10 being the most popular.

How Do I Find The PageRank of a Web page?

If you download the Google Toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com) then the PageRank for every website you visit will be displayed from within the toolbar: -

Here you can see that the Google PageRank for Microsoft.com (at the time of writing this article) is 9.

How Do I Increase The PageRank Of My Website?

There is only one way to increase the PageRank of your website: get more inbound links. Before you dash off and start trying to get more links to your website there a few things you should know about how PR is calculated. PR is not calculated based on a simple count of the number of the links that point to your website, it also takes into consideration the PR of the web page that provides the link to your website and how many other outbound links there are on that webpage. So the higher PR-rated web page you obtain the link from, the more PageRank will be transferred to your website! So for example, a single link from a PR6 website might be worth 30 links from PR1 websites.

This table shows an approximation of the number of links you will need in order to obtain a certain PageRank.

You can see that to get a website of PR5, there are different combinations to do it. For example, you’ll get a ranking of PR5 if you have 16,803 links from PR1 websites, or 3,055 from PR2 websites, or 555 links from PR3 websites etc etc….

But wait, there's even more to it! Not only does Google take into consideration the PR of the web page that provides the link to your website, it also looks at the number of other links on the web page that provide the link, in effect the more links the the page provides the more the PageRank is diluted. So, if you manage to get a link from a PR6 website then that's great, but if that web page also provides links to hundreds of other websites, then it might actually be as effective as a link from a PR1 or PR2 website.

PR Is Not The Be-All and End-All!

At one time PageRank was the most important factor when calculating the search engine results. Nowadays it's less important, and other factors have now become more important (which I will cover in later lessons).

One thing I try to avoid is PR-watching. Many webmasters are so obsessed with PageRank that they lose site of more important factors such as obtaining links from relevant websites that are in the same topic theme as yourself. One phrase I say to people who ask me about PR is,

"PR is vanity, Rankings are sanity"

What would you rather have, a website with a high page rank but a bad position in the results, or a low PR with a good position in the results - I know which I would choose!

I personally never take PageRank into consideration when I link to a website, or request a link from a website. The only things I consider are; is the website's theme similar to my own website? and, is the website a 'quality website' that provides useful content that people on my website would find useful? If you stick to this system then there's no way you can fail.

In my next guide I will explain how you can get your website indexed by the search engines in under 24 hours.