Google Page Rank Explained

by Tom Norman on November 28, 2009

It is a well known fact in the world of webmasters that you need lots of links in order to rank well in the search engine results pages. But no all links are worth the same, you can have 3000 links and rank higher than someone with 20,000 if your links are from sites of a better quality.

There are many things that affect how much a given link is worth but the main one that holds the most weight is the Page Rank or PR that Google has assigned the page you’re receiving the link from.

Every page that Google can see will receive a Page Rank (PR) from 0-10, 0 being the lowest and 10 being the highest. This will not happen immediately because PR is only reviewed once every 6 months or so. Achieving a PR of 10 is almost impossible unless you have a very large, very popular corporate website, like apple.com, but even that is only a PR 9. Some pages have a PR of n/a and this can mean several things, one that the page is younger than 6 months and Google hasn’t ranked it yet, or because its an unimportant page deep in a site, or because Google has detected something it doesn’t like on that site and blacklisted it.

So what is there to gain from a good PR? Well, if your site receives a link from a high PR site like a PR 7 or 8, then it will massively more beneficial than a link from a PR 1 or 2 site. In essence, what PR is, is how valuable and genuine Google considers the content of your page to be on a scale of 0-10. Each link counts as a vote for the integrity of the page it is linking to, and so if a PR 8 page votes for you then Google concludes that your page must be of high value, because a high value site says it is, and it will therefore push you further up the results rankings.

PR is sometimes misunderstood by webmasters in that they believe that if they have a higher PR, they will rank better in the search engines. This is not true, but a high PR will give you a MUCH better basis for climbing the rankings. Once you start accumulating some reasonably good PR, you will find that lots of people want to get links from you. This will allow you to ask for higher quality links back as the link you will be giving them will be of a high quality.

When you first start trying to get some PR for your site, you will be faced with what is almost a catch 22 situation in that the main way in which PR is achieved, is by getting quality links. However, people will be unwilling to give you and quality links until you have some PR to give them a quality link back. So to start with, it is rather a long process.

An ideal way to start your linking campaign is to find sites that are in the same boat as yours in that they are looking to build lots of links to gain PR. If you can get links from as many of these sites as possible, then in 6-12 months all of them should have at least some PR, meaning that if they’re still linking to you, you will have some PR, allowing you to start trading links with sites that have higher and higher PR.

There are other things that are taken into account when Google calculates your PR. Obviously nobody knows all of them except the people who develop the system, otherwise everyone would manipulate it to give them good PR, but what we do know is that sites that are regularly updated with fresh new content hold far more sway with Google and other search engines than sites that are left for long periods of time.

The reasoning behind this is that if a site has fresh new content every week or every fortnight or so, then the information will be the most up to date and relevant to modern times as opposed to a site that has had the same content on it for a year. Google wants to give people the best, most up to date information related to what they are looking for. If you bear this in mind when starting a PR campaign, along with the correct linking methods, you cant go far wrong.

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