Jan 14 2008
What is PageRank and Do I Need It?
Google PageRank was invented by Google founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin and is only used by the Google search engine. To some(me included) it can be referred to as the web’s currency.
In its basic sense, Pagerank is the measure of global link popularity and is determined by the amount of links/backlinks that you have pointing to your sites web pages. So in general, the more back links you have pointing to your site, the more pagerank you will have which is a number from 0 to 10. This in itself though is not an accurate statement as you will see further down in this post.
Google has a theory/idea of what they call “the random surfer”. They beleive that If you were to pick a random web surfer and that person was to start at a web page and then click random links on the different pages he/she visited, the likelyhood that they would eventually hit your page is your pagerank. So if you have a page/site with a pagerank of say 9, its very likely that sooner or later the random surfer will hit your website/page.
The reason that I say page/site is that pagerank is awarded to each individual page and not to the site as a whole.
To view your sites Google PageRank you can download the Google toolbar which shows you the pagerank of every site/page you visit.
So now I hear you say. “So how do I get pagerank and do I need it?”
You don’t need pagerank unless you want to sell links on your website. Pagerank will happen naturally as you build more and more backlinks to your website’s pages. For example if you have a link to your mainpage on somebody else’s site if that page that is linking to you has a PR of 6, you and all the other sites that are being linked to will share that pagerank. Obviously its better to get a link from a page that only links to a few external sites than it is to get a link from a page that has hundreds of links on it.
There is a formula for working out pagerank distribution but it is very very technical and I will not go into it here. Just Google for it!
Some people believe that PR is a factor in ranking. Its hard to say for sure but as your pagrank is determined by the amount of links you have to your site, and the more links you have generally means that you will have good rankings, I would say that PR is just an indication and is not in itself a factor.
So there you have it, a brief explanation of Google PageRank. Keep building quality backlinks to your site and your pagerank will increase naturally.
For a detailed description of how Google ranks and index’s pages and of how pagerank works please view their original document The anatomy of a search engine. To me, this document is fascinating and gives you a real insight as to how Brin and Page think and how their search engine has developed since this document was first written.