What is Page Rank and How Does It Work?

As 2006 faced its last weeks, Google was the favorite among search engine. Most of Google's popularity is credited to its preferred form of search engine optimization, a trademarked program Google dubbed Google PageRank.

PageRank defined

According to www.pro-seo.com/glossary.html, Check PageRank aka PR is one of the methods Google uses to determine the relevance or importance of a Web page. PageRank is a vote, by all the other Web pages on the Internet, about how important a Web page is. A link to a Web page counts as a vote of support. If there are no incoming links to a Web page then there is no support.

Google explains it just about the same. Each link is considered to be a vote; however, Google does not consider all votes to be equal. It considers some votes to be more important or valuable than others.

PageRank explained

Google Pagerank Search Engines operates under a democratic nature by determining web relevance with links which are considered votes. Each vote counts, but not all the votes are counted the same. During its analyses Google looks at more than just the volume of votes a webpage receives, it also takes into account the page that cast the vote.

"Important" sites help to make other sites "important." In other words if a high ranking site offers the link then Google counts this vote more heavily. Thus a link for a site in the top ten can help your website, while a link from a site that is low in rank, or doesn’t relate to your site, does very little to improve your search engine ranking.

Google has designed Google PageRank to be an eight-unit measurement. It displays the value PageRank places on each website directly beside each website it displays.

Why does the page matter as opposed to the volume? Due to spamdexing Google had to make its analysis stricter. People were swapping links with one another in mass quantities, or buying them from other websites. To combat this Google made the quality of the link outweigh the actual quantity. In 2005, it designed and activated a program called nofollow, a program they designed to allow webmasters and bloggers to create links that PageRank would ingnore. The same system was also used to keep spamdexing to a minumum.

Content analysis

Anyone who surfs the net knows that "important" pages mean nothing if the do not suit your needs. This is why in addition with PageRank, Google uses sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are relevant to your query.

Many SEOs are fixated with search engine ranking and this is understandable as it is one of the best ways to gain traffic, but while they are out there trying to get links from high PageRanking pages, they need to keep in mind that PageRanking alone is not enough.

To Check PageRank is essentially, only a score that represents the value of a page, as Google determines it. Getting a link to your pages from a high PR page will add some value to your page. But that does not take into account the context of the link -- the words in the link -- the anchor text. Your SEO plan should contain more than just PageRanking in order for you to have long term success on the internet.

Jeff Casmer is an internet marketing consultant and work at home business owner. For more information on search engines optimization please visit his "Top Ranked" Best SEO Products To Improve Rankings Directory gives you all the information you need to Earn Money Working From Home in the 21st century.