Dave, maybe you can explain something for me: my Web site Freedom For Animals.org apparently has a PageRank of two out of ten (2/10), and I don’t really understand what that means. Does it mean, for example, that my organization’s site is #2 out of 10 hits?
It’s hard to pin down exactly what Google means when it talks about PageRank, but the best definition is that its a rough indication of the popularity of a Web page. A higher PageRank indicates a more popular page.
Notice here that I’m not talking about Web sites here too: Google considers every page of a Web site to be an autonomous entity, one thing that quite frequently confuses people. We’ve all been taught to think about Web sites, but the new, modern Web is all about separate autonomous pages, not sites at all.
Let’s jump back to PageRank for a moment, though. Google PageRank is a measure of the relative popularity of a site, ranging from a rank of zero (you have insufficient inbound links or are too new to have a rank) to a rank of ten (which means you’re one of the dozen top sites on the entire network).
A few example values: www.yahoo.com has a PageRank of 9, www.google.com has a PageRank of 10, www.microsoft.com has a PageRank of 9 and www.redcross.org has a PageRank of 8.
But PageRank isn’t just an indication of how many Web pages point to your page, it’s an indication of how important those sites that point to your page are too. This is the piece of the Google algorithm that make its search engine so darn interesting: if a small number of highly popular (e.g., high PageRank) pages point to your page, you could be considered more important than if hundreds of less important Web sites have links to you.
As a result, everyone who pays attention to PageRank dreams of showing up on the Google home page. That’d be a glorious day for your PageRank!
So now that we’ve talked about how PageRank is calculated, let’s spend some time talking about why you should – or, perhaps, shouldn’t – care about its value.
First off, let’s set aside a common misunderstanding: a higher PageRank does not mean you’ll have better Search Engine Results Placement (or SERP, as search engine geeks call it). Or, at least, it’s only one of what’s likely over 100 different variables fed into the calculation of what Web pages should be shown in what order as the result of a specific Web search query.
You can see that if you’ve installed the Google Toolbar, actually. Perform a search for something relatively uncommon, then check the PageRank value of the top 10-15 results. You’ll see that the top match or two are often not the highest PageRank pages on that list of the top dozen.
In the Search Engine Optimization (SEO) community, a lot of people pay a lot of attention to PageRank, and seek links to their pages (and sites overall) from other sites with relatively high PageRank. Other SEO people, however, encourage all of us to just simply ignore PageRank entirely and instead focus on building good Web sites.
What’s my view? Well, as I wrote at length in my popular book Growing Your Business with Google, I think it’s useful to pay attention to your Google PageRank, but the best long-term Web strategy is to build a smart site that offers your online community or marketplace valuable content presented in a readable and credible manner.
And, yeah, asking your friends and colleagues for links to your site doesn’t hurt either!
Although it is interesting to read about PR and to see a good number for my site, my main focus is to build backlinks and see the placement of web pages in Google search results.
Hi, and thanks for the explanation. Being new to all this I wasn’t quite sure about the pr thing, so this cleared it up.
Thanks
Thanks for this article you made. I have actually Google page rank 2 so far and I didn’t know what’s the meaning of it so I search to found out this things. Thanks for your post.
I couldn’t agree more. This is a must-read for people that become obsessed with their PR. Thanks!
Firstly thank you for your post you have made me look at things in a diferent prespective, thanks
I have just recently launched my site and have been looking alot into how to get a higher page rank in order to get nearer to a first page result.
I have spent endless hours reading on SEO and backlinks etc that I overlooked the simple things like using: html validator and broken links checker tools that check your site and give you warnings and sugestions on your code. I though my site was complete untill I ran it through online site cheacker and meta tag analyzers and found tons of problems i wasnt even aware of – I had obselete links i didnt even know I had! highly recommended
I think you have a very good point along with others who have also left comments, content and the amount of traffic a website receives in my opinion are bound to be a few of the most imporant thing they evaluate. They obviously want to be the best search engine in the world by being able to provide the most relelvant webpages according the the user search. They cant just rely on meta tags to do this . If you have enough quality content and many people coming to your site google will soon see this as a sign that this site is relevant.
Too many people are lookng for quick results there and too many webpages to compete with. The way I see it there must be millions of people selling the same service we do, why would mine come first – all i can do is concentrate in improving my sites actual content and slowly but surely “if you build it they wll come”
Google analytics code on your site lets google see how many people exactly is coming to your page and where the traffic came from giving them more info to work with.
Build a good site visualy and most imporantly correctly (content and code) – use as much free web advertising as possible (there is more out there trust me) and if you havent tried it yet try google adwords and see how it does for you, they give you £50 free advertising and Bing ad centre gives you £30 free advertising credit.
one last tip do your homework on the main keywords for you category and expand on them so that your credit does’nt run out in a flash, resulting in getting more sales convertions as opposed to getting loads of people clicking on your site and not acually buying anything.
Sorry about the long message but just wanted to unload some info to poeple probably reading the same material I am at the mo – thanks again for the info Good Post
In my opinion Pagerank means more than just links. I think Googe looks at overall web presence, because I do not have very many links but I have serveral references on the web. (videos, blogs, social media sites)
My website’s competitors have PR of 5 – 6 and they are using paid PR back links. Its proving very difficult to compete with them google should ban paid back links. It should be spammed.