What Is Page Rank And Why Do We Want It?

Everyone seems to be scrambling around trying to get links on websites with a high google page rank. I see lists of people posting on freelance websites, "I need 100 inbound links with PR5 or higher!", "Inbound Links needed from PR3 and above websites", etc. etc.

I get emails from webmasters all the time wanting to trade links with me because I have a higher pages rank than they do. I have to use all sorts of filtering methods in the Webmaster Forums I manage to keep the spammers from posting links in the forum because it has a high page rank.

The spammers keep coming up with new nicknames and websites, and even new ip addresses. Getting their link on a high pr website or forum is so important to them they are like roaches after leftover cake in your kitchen at night. (I hope you don't really have roaches .. . or spammers.)

The funny thing is that I don't even see the posters on the freelance sites even adding that the links need to be from related websites. Just any link on a page with high page rank.

According to Wikipedia.com "PageRank is a family of algorithms for assigning numerical weightings to hyperlinked documents (or web pages) indexed by a search engine. Its properties are much discussed by search engine optimization (SEO) experts. The popular search engine Google to help determine a page’s relevance or importance uses the PageRank system. Google’s founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin developed it while at Stanford University in 1998."

However, examine search results and you will find that page rank isn't the only determining factor in search engine placement, although it has value and is part of the algorithm. Let's do a search on SEO in Google.

Site 1: PR7
Site 2: PR0 - doesn't have anything to do with search engine optimization
Site 3: PR4
Site 4: PR6 - Wikipedia reference to search engine optimization
Site 5: PR6
Site 6: PR6
Site 7: PR6
Site 8: PR4
Site 9: PR5
Site 10: PR7

Hmm a PR0 website is number 2. Now these were SEO websites, so the people there know how to get page rank so lets don't just use one example. Lets try a search for something neither as competitive nor likely to draw professionals to optimize websites for. How about Cereal?

Site 1: PR7
Site 2: PR5
Site 3: PR5
Site 4: PR4
Site 5: PR5
Site 6: PR6
Site 7: PR5
Site 8: PR4
Site 9: PR6
Site 10: PR4

While they all have decent page rank on those search terms, the websites are not ranked in the listings in order of page rank. Elementary my dear Watson, but what exactly is page rank then and why do we want it?

According to webworkshop.net, "PageRank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google figures that when one page links to another page, it is effectively casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for a page, the more important the page must be. Also, the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself is. Google calculates a page's importance from the votes cast for it. How important each vote is is taken into account when a page's PageRank is calculated.

PageRank is Google's way of deciding a page's importance. It matters because it is one of the factors that determine a page's ranking in the search results. It isn't the only factor that Google uses to rank pages, but it is an important one.

Notes: Not all links are counted by Google. For instance, they filter out links from known link farms. Some links can cause a site to be penalized by Google. They rightly figure that webmasters cannot control which sites link to their sites, but they can control which sites they link out to. For this reason, links into a site cannot harm the site, but links from a site can be harmful if they link to penalized sites. So be careful which sites you link to. If a site has PR0, it is usually a penalty, and it would be unwise to link to it."

One correction I would make to that. A PR0 is not likely because a website was penalized. If the page rank is grayed out in your Google toolbar when visiting the site it might be because of a penalty. If you built a website today, it would have PR0 and not because you have been penalized.

This website and others also claim to have a formula for calculating page rank. I don't believe those formulas are correct. No one outside of Google has the correct formula. This is not an exact science that you can say x number of links from x number of websites with page rank of x will give you page rank of x. Any of these people with formulas claim that they can do this are simply misleading people or misleading themselves.

The facts that we do know about page rank are;

1. One-way inbound links from websites with topics that are related to your website's topic will help you gain a higher page rank.

2. Other one-way inbound links from pages with high page rank but unrelated topics do help a little, but not nearly as much.

3. The number of links outbound from the website that links to you also determines the value of the link. A related website with 10 outbound links that links to you is much better than a related website with 100 outbound links that link to you.

The website I referred to above loves to state a lot of things as fact, such as,

"Fact: A website has a maximum amount of PageRank that is distributed between its pages by internal links.

The maximum PageRank in a site equals the number of pages in the site * 1. The maximum is increased by inbound links from other sites and decreased by outbound links to other sites. We are talking about the overall PageRank in the site and not the PageRank of any individual page. You don't have to take my word for it. You can reach the same conclusion by using a pencil and paper and the equation.

Fact: The maximum amount of PageRank in a site increases as the number of pages in the site increases.

The more pages that a site has, the more PageRank it has. Again, by using a pencil and paper and the equation, you can come to the same conclusion. Bear in mind that the only pages that count are the ones that Google knows about.

I dispute both of those "facts". I cannot get a page rank of 30,000 in my article directory although I have 30,000 pages in it that have been indexed by google. Again, an elementary conclusion.

There are seo gurus who will tell you that the higher the page rank the deeper Google will crawl your website. Maybe. Google doesn't say that is the case though.

Also important to keep in mind that search engines crawl and index webpages not websites, that is why your page rank may vary from page to page within your website.

Good internal linking and navigation can help distribute page rank well throughout your website. Your index page is the most important page Google indexes and your other pages will inherit some page rank from your index page because it is linked from there.

I have one website that is a PR4 on the main page but contains several PR5 and PR6 webpages in the interior of the website proving that Google ranks webpages individually.

When you are doing your link building campaign, do it for more than just the index page. Put links out there for your interior pages as well.

Webmasters and individuals will link to quality content and quality content is the single best way to higher page rank and search engine listings.Content is still king. Links are not king.

People link to articles and content that is original and well-written and that contain quality information not found elsewhere. Google also ranks webpages higher in listings that have quality content. That’s why it is still the best SEO method there is.