What is Google PageRank or PR?
If you’re a webmaster then you may know what Google PageRank is and how it works. You may also know what important role it plays for your website. Even though most of us have an understanding of this technology, a lot of the time I’ve seen webmasters misinterpret it. Coming across so many of those misinterpretation, I finally thought I’ll explain it on my own words and give some official reference so that next time I see someone having slightest doubt about it I can then refer them to this article. I tried to write it in the simplest way possible so that people who aren’t familiar with this term or technology can understand it very easily. So, hopefully after reading this article you’ll know exactly what PR is and how it works.
What is Google PageRank™ or PR?
PageRank™ is Google’s patented algorithm which analyzes which sites have been “voted” the best sources of information by other pages across the web. Simply put, Google PageRank™ is a way of measuring the weight or importance of a webpage on the web. While Google justifies more than 200 factors of a webpage to find the most relevant results for a given search query, PageRank™ is one of the most important factors that Google takes into consideration. Google is always conservative when it comes to their core technology and the PageRank™ is no exception to that. Here’s a reference to PageRank™ on Google’s Technology page:
PageRank™ Technology: PageRank™ reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank™ and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.
PageRank™ also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page’s importance.
How does PageRank™ Work?
I won’t go into the full mathematical explanation of how the PageRank™ technology works. Simply, PageRank™ is calculated based on linking strategy which Google calls “a voting system”. So when a webpage links to another webpage, that first webpage is basically voting for the second webpage giving that webpage a priority among the other webpages. It’s not as simple or easy as I may have made it sound but that’s what it is in a nut shell.
Google describes this as:
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. In essence, 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”.
As you can see links from “important” webpages pass higher value to the linked pages. And how’s the importance of a webpage calculated? Again, by its PR. So it’s the quality of votes or links that matters not the volume of votes or links. This is a common misconception among the webmasters.
The links can work both good and bad ways for you. While good backward links help you get higher PR and may help you rank higher in the SEPRs (remember, Google uses 200 other factors to return a relevant webpage), the bad links can get you penalized by Google. So think twice or do your research before getting a link from another site to get a PR push. I will discuss about this in more details some other time as this requires its own topic.
If you were interested to see the PageRank algorithm then check out the Wikipedia page for PageRank.
Difference between internal PageRank and Toolbar PageRank
Internal PageRank is the PageRank of your internal pages that hasen’t been passed onto the toolbar PageRank yet. If your webpage is indexed then it’s very likely that Google has assigned a PageRank to it. It could be anywhere in the PageRank scale of 0-10. And this PageRank gets passed onto the Toolbar PageRank and becomes visible to everyone when Google updates their PageRank once every few months. As Matt Cutts explained:
PageRank is computed continuously; there are machines that take inputs to the PageRank algorithm at Google and compute the resulting PageRanks. So at any given time, a url in Google’s system has up-to-date PageRank as a result of running the computation with the inputs to the algorithm. From time-to-time, that internal PageRank value is exported so that it’s visible to Google Toolbar users.
Does PageRank update gives you an instant push in the Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs)?
No. Why? Because as explained before, those PageRanks were already incorporated into your site and have been gradually affecting your sites performance in the Search Engines since the last PageRank update. It’s just that they weren’t visible in the toolbar up until the PageRank update. As Matt Cutts said:
By the time you see newer PageRanks in the toolbar, those values have already been incorporated in how we score/rank our search results. So while you may be happy to see that the Google Toolbar shows a little more PageRank for a given page, it’s not as if that causes a change in search results at that point. So you won’t see any search engine result page (SERP) changes as a result of this PageRank export–those changes have been gradually baking in since the last PageRank export.
But, there’s a twist here. Though the PageRank update won’t give instant kick to your SERPs, you will have greater chance of being listed higher in the SERPs for any consecutive content update. Check out this “Why is Google PageRank or PR Important?” article to understand why and how.
How can you check the PageRank of a website?
This is how PageRank of a website looks:
You can check the PageRank of your website with this PageRank Checker from our SEO Tools section.
Or you can also check your PageRank by installing Google Toolbar for your browser. Once installed, your browser will restart and Google Toolbar plugin will be added to your browser. After this whenever you go to a website, Google PageRank bar on the toolbar will show the PageRank of that webpage like the one on the image above.
I’ve tried to explain it precisely but very clearly for everyone to understand what PageRank is and how it works. But if you have any question or if you think I’ve missed something here then please leave your message in the comments below.
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