Pagerank What you need to know

Since the early days of the world wide web, search engines have tried and tested different methods of trying to rank webpages. “Pagerank” is the method invented by Google to measure the relative importance of a webpage, often referred to as “popularity”.

So, what exactly is Pagerank and how is it calculated? According to google “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”

What this means is that pagerank results from a vote amongst all the pages on the internet. A link from one page to another is counted as a vote. A page that is linked by many pages with a high pagerank, receives a high pagerank itself. Conversely, if a page has no links pointing to it, it receives no “votes” and as a result receives a lower pagerank.

To find out the pagerank of your website or any other website, you need to install the google toolbar. The pagerank tab is visible on this toolbar. The google toolbar pagerank ranges from 0 to 10. The scale of pagerank is widely considered to be logarithmic. The exact details of this are not available.

Now that you know exactly what Pagerank is, here’s what you can do to achieve a higher pagerank for your website :

Get External Links!

Try to obtain as many links as possible to your website. Check the Pagerank of the website that will be linking to yours. Linking with a website which has a pagerank of 0 is pretty useless.

Always check the number of links present on the page where you might want your link listed. If the page has many links on it then it becomes obvious to the search engine spider that this page was created by the webmaster specifically to exchange links and therefore reduces it’s importance. This can happen when the page concerned has a high pagerank itself. Therefore, it can be more beneficial to link with a webpage that has a lower pagerank, of say 4, and with lesser number of links on it than with a page of pagerank 6 which has many links on it.

Try to get your website listed on directories such as DMOZ and Yahoo. They seem to play a great role on Googl’es algorithm.

Work on internal links

Getting links from externwal websites is well and good but it is also hard to control. However, you have control over the links between your pages and they can play an important role.

It is important to organise the pages of your website well. Each page with a pagerank can transmit some of it’s pagreank to a page linking to it. Supposing your homepage has achieved a decent pagerank, your inside pages can benefit from this by being linked to from the homepage. If however, you do many links, the share of pagerank distributed to each page will be weaker.

Be careful whom you link to from your pages. Google knows that webmasters do not have control over who links to their webpages. However, they also know that webmasters have full control over whom they link to. Linking to websites that have been banned from google or removed from their index can cause harm to the pagerank of your website.