Oct
Google Page Rank Explained
If you are trying to get a higher search engine ranking, you probably have seen the term “Google Pagerank” or “Google PR”.
Read on for an explanation of what Google Page Rank is and how it affects your search engine rank.
In very simple terms a page rank is an indicator of the quality of a particular page on website. By quality, it is not about the number of links to a certain web page but also other certain criteria that Google will not release.
Google Pagerank is a whole number from 0 – 10, as 10 is the highest quality and 0 is the lowest.
Here is a free tool to check Google page rank on any web page.
When your checking PR, what you will see is for that page only, not the whole site.
You can also download the Google Toolbar.
Once you download, you will see the PR area and if toolbar is gray, that page has no PR.
If your website has pages on it that have a grey toolbar this could mean that
- The page is new and Google does not know about it OR
- The page may contains duplicate content OR
- Your website may have been de-indexed from Google
If the toolbar is white, you have a page rank of zero. A PR 0 is very common for a new website or a new web page.
Google usually updates the page rank on the toolbar every few months so if you have a new website it may take several months for page rank to show on the toolbar.
Google does updating pagerank of sites on an ongoing basis, so the page rank shown on the toolbar is not a true pagerank, it is just a snapshot of your page rank from a given time.
Increase Google Page Rank
To increase your page rank you need high quality backlinks to your web pages.
A backlink is simply an incoming link from another website to your own site.
The best way to get links naturally is by writing good content that other webmasters will want to link to your site.
But most webmasters build backlinks by distributing articles, submitting their website to directories, exchanging links, distributing press releases, commenting on blogs etc. More information on website promotion.
It is not just the number of backlinks that count towards page rank, it’s also the quality of these links.
For example, a link from a PR6 page could increase your chances of getting a higher page rank, more than say, a link from a PR4 page.
The number of links on the page that is linking to you also affects how much page rank is passed on to your web page. A link from a page that has 5 quality links on it is of more value than a link from a page with 40 links on it.
Google Page Rank can play an important part in how a web page is ranked in Google’s search engine results. But, depending on the keyword search terms, I have seen web pages that are PR 1 appear on the first page of SERP (search engine results page) with PR 5 and above sites.
Page rank can be a useful indicator of how popular a web page is, but it is only part of the equation.
So, take note of your website’s page rank, but don’t think that once you get a PR2 or PR 4 you will automatically be in the top pages in the SERP.
It is more important that your traffic is increasing, not your page rank.
