Demystifying Google PageRank

January 25, 2011 by FTS
Filed under Internet Marketing SEO

The Google PageRank is the subject of wide discussion and speculation in the SEM industry. Many think that it has no impact on the ranking of a page in Google, while others believe it is crucial. This article explains the concept of PageRank and how any webmaster or Search Engine Optimisation agency can improve it. It also discusses the importance and impact of PageRank on a webpage’s placement in the search engine results.

What does PageRank mean?

“PageRank” or “PR” is a term used by Google to indicate the popularity of a page. The popularity of a webpage, according to Google, is determined by the number of links from other pages on the World Wide Web that point to this page.
Google considers all incoming links to a page to be a positive vote, confirming the relevancy and superiority of a page. In other words, if page B and C have a link pointing to page A, Google understands that B and C consider that page A as a good one. Obviously , Google does not consider only the number of incoming link a page has. It also considers the quality of this link. If page B has a PageRank of 6 and page C a PageRank of 2, Google will consider the link from page B to bear much more significance (a vote with a higher impact) than page C.

Consequently, votes from pages B and C give a PageRank to page A. This PageRank is a grade between 0 and 10. This PageRank can be viewed on the little green bar in the GoogleToolBar. In order to view the PageRank a user should go into the options setting on the Google Toolbar and enable the service under the “More” tab. Absence of a green bar for a page means the PageRank is 0. A greyed-out PageRank indicates that the page has either not yet been indexed, assigned a PageRank or has been banned / delisted by Google.

Although the PageRank algorithm is extremely complicated, for the purpose of this article it is enough to understand that the PR is no more than a direct indication of the number and quality of links

How can we spot a good quality backlink?

In general a link pointing to a page, which can be spidered by Google and will contribute towards an increase in the PageRank would be considered to be a good backlink for that page.
Plain text links, made of plain text (knows as the anchor text) surrounded by simple HTML link code are usually ideal. The URL referenced in the link HTML should point directly to the page e.g. http://www.example.com/ and should not be redirected to the destination page via a script, e.g. /redir.php?linkdestination=123456. The Google algorithm cannot decipher script code and so it will not consider a redirected link to be a vote for the page in question.

Other characteristics of good backlinks include:
• The page where the link comes from must not contain a nofollow attribute (rel=”nofollow”) in the anchor tag HTML
• Both link source and destination pages should be relevant to each other
• Anchor text should also be relevant to the subject of both the source and destination pages
• The backlink should be contained in the main body of the source page rather than being placed in the footer or some obscure position
• The source page should ideally have a higher PageRank than the one the link points to
• The number of outgoing links from the source page should be few and should not exceed 100 links.

Google has been putting an effort to get rid of the spam on the search results. This has led to a devaluation of links that have been paid for and reduction in the PageRank of websites that have a high percentage of low-quality backlinks. The former was a result of recent changes in the PageRank algorithm that led to a reduction in PR of a number of popular websites that sold links. The latter was a result of changes made in the Google algorithm that incorporated a new measure called Spam Mass. As a result, buying and selling links can negatively affect PageRank, as can having too many low quality links pointing to a page.

Influence of PageRank on SERPs (Search Engine Results Pages:

It is often thought that PageRank has a direct impact on the web page’s ranking in the search engine results, and therefore a page with a PR6 will automatically have a better rank than a page with a PR4. Wrong. PageRank does not directly influence a page’s ranking on Google.
Google never takes into account solely the PageRank to determine rank. However it does use (among other things) the number, quality and relevance of backlinks to determine the page’s rank, factors which also influence the PageRank itself.
Let’s say we have a Mobile Website Design design page. A PR 3 page on our site out-ranks PR 6, PR 7 and PR 8 sites from much larger companies like T-Mobile, Virgin, LG, Samsung and even Google themselves! This is because the anchor text and quality of links pointing to our web page are directly related to mobile websites while the competitors are just websites that sell mobiles or provide mobile related services, and probably have many other links pointing to them that are not as relevant to mobile websites.

As mentioned earlier, the PageRank is a simple indication of the number and quality of links pointing to a page. Nothing more and nothing less.

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