Google Page Rank is an important part of the Google algorithm and it determines the authority of a site in Google’s Index. In short PageRank is Google’s way of deciding the importance of a web page. It was developed by Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin while at Stanford University in 1998. As Google puts it:

“PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.”

The more votes that are cast for a web site page, the more important the page becomes. Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines the overall importance the vote. Google calculates a page’s importance from the votes cast for it, it is the vote of trust. How important each vote is is taken into account when a webpage’s PageRank is calculated.

PageRank is also displayed on the toolbar of your browser if youve installed the Google toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com/).

How can you determine the page rank of your site ?

When you get a Google toolbar installed in your browser, you will be able to see each page’s PageRank as you browse the web. Pages that are new or that haven’t been indexed by Google before the last Google page rank update certainly will not have any PageRank. What is happening is that one or more pages on the site have been indexed and a PageRank has been calculated. The PageRank figure for the site’s pages that haven’t been indexed is allocated dynamically just for your toolbar.

Page Rank Spoofing

While the PR shown is usually accurate for most sites it could be easily manipulated. A current flaw is that any low PageRank page that is redirected, via a 302 server header or a “Refresh” meta tag, to a high PR page causes the redirected lower PR page to acquire the PR of the destination source page. In theory a new, PR0 page with no incoming links can be redirected to the Google home page - which is a PR 10 - and by the next PageRank update the PR of the new page will be upgraded to a PR10. This is called spoofing and is a known failing or bug in the system. Any page’s Page rank can be spoofed to a higher or lower number of the webmaster’s choice and only Google has access to the real PR of the web page.

Importance of Page Rank

PageRank is still one of Google’s more ingenious strategies in determining the authority of a web page or website, and is certainly one of the many reasons for its well known importance. Partly, this is due to a combination of two factors. Firstly that the very nature of PageRank is difficult to manipulate, and secondly that the exact details and factors behind the PR value assigned is a closely guarded secret.

Clearly, the sheer number of pages linking to you will not influence your PageRank. Of far greater importance is the PageRank of each of these pages, and how many links appear on them. Common sense certainly needs to be applied here. In theory, one simple way to improve your PageRank is to get a link back from a top quality site with a PR of 9 or 10, linking to you from the front page of their website. In practice, this might be a little difficult to achieve.

Not surprisingly, very few pages score a PR10, and those that do includes the likes of Yahoo, Google itself, AltaVista, AOL, Mozilla.org and others. In other words we’re looking at the biggest of the biggest websites - and not something that most of us could ever hope to achieve!

PageRank’s primary aim involves in determining the authority of a web page for a particular term in the web today - but in order to show up in the search to start with, your site needs to be properly tuned, optimised and have good, solid content.

Factors that determine the Page Rank

The key rule to understand is that it is a combination of factors that determine how well your site performs in Google. These are the most important factors to worry about:

Incoming links to your site.

The relevancy of the pages linking to your site and the PageRank of these pages.

The keywords that other sites use to link to your site.

Some of those factors can be controlled and the others can be manipulated. The important thing to understand regarding PageRank of a web page is that all these factors will determine how high your site shows up in search engine results.

Conclusion

Try to build or maintain a good website with good content, always keep in mind your important keywords and proactively work every day to create new backlinks to your site you, which inturn will improve your PageRank. The best sites with the highest PageRank never worry about PageRank, they simply keep churning out content that people love to link to. This is a strategy that every webmaster and Internet entrepreneur should emulate for success online.

S Prema is Search Engine Optimization Executive for UK-based internet marketing company, Star Internet Ltd. Clients of Star Internet benefit from a range of services designed to maximise ROI from internet marketing activities. To find out more, visit http://www.affordable-seo.co.uk