1 Comment Written by Anders on July 28, 2008 – 9:08 pm

If you have spent any time on the internet, particularly doing any sort of online business, then you know that Google PageRank is one of the most importantly discussed factors in the world of Search Engine Optimization.

Every website owner strives to get the all important high PageRank with Google. If a webmaster has a PR2 they want it higher. If they have a PR 5 they want it higher. It is a never ending battle to be the best of the best as far as ranking with the most popular search engine online.

PageRank is a numeric value that represents just how important a page is viewed on the internet. Google assumes that when one page links to another page it is basically casting its vote for the other page.

The more votes that a page gets then the more important that page seems.

Google also calculates the importance of a page by where the links are coming from or basically which pages are linking for that particular page. While PageRank is not the only factor that determines where your website may be listed in search results, it is definitely one of the most important factors to consider.

You should note that the more inbound links your page has the higher your PageRank will be.

• 10 Links from Pagrank 0 sites equals 1 Link from a PR1 page
• 10 Links from Pagrank 1 sites equals 1 Link from a PR2 page
• 10 Links from Pagrank 2 sites equals 1 Link from a PR3 page
• 10 Links from Pagrank 3 sites equals 1 Link from a PR4 page
• 10 Links from Pagrank 4 sites equals …

Normally Google updates their PageRank every 3-5 months. This process takes a few days until all datacenters are updated. After that it won’t change until the next update.

Here are some common mistakes and misunderstandings that we can help you to clarify:

Same Page but different PageRank

The rank of a particular page is based only on that page, not on the domain as a whole.
For instance:

• http://www.domain.com might have a different PR than http://www.domain.com/index.htm although it is actually the same page!
• PageRank can be different on URLs with www and without www
• A trailing slash could make a difference:
  http://www.domain.com may have a different PageRank than http://www.domain.com/

To a web spider or crawler, www.domain.com, domain.com/, www.domain.comindex.html and domain.com/index.html are all different URLs and therefore are considered to be different pages.

Visitors may arrive at a website’s homepage through any of these URLs and will be taken to the same page as other visitors who use another version.

Web spiders see all these as different or individual URLs. This makes a major difference when deciding PageRank.

Basically it makes no different what your filename is; the spider can not determine the filename of a page that it gets back when it is requesting a specific URL. If you link to the index.htm of your site the spider does not recognize that.

The spider simply picks up on the links and assumes that all your URLs are different. If you standardize your URL for your homepage it will help to ensure that your PageRank is not shared with ghost or unimportant URLs. This will give you a much better chance of receiving the PageRank that you want for the specific pages that you want.

It should also be noted that if your pages can be found under different URLs you may experience problems with Google and other search engines for duplicate content.

Search engines pick up the URLs as different so when they see two pages that are just alike they may consider the content on your pages to be duplicated which is definitely not a good thing where articles and other website content are concerned.

Online Page rank checkers:

OR checker - http://www.prchecker.info/

Dig pagerank -  http://www.digpagerank.com/

Check My PR - http://www.checkmypr.com/

Domain page rank - http://www.domainpagerank.com/

Do Expiring Domains Loose Their PageRank?

Absolutely NOT!! PageRank, again is based on the links on the page and their estimated value by the search engine. It has nothing whatsoever to do with whether or not that particular domain is expired.

However - Expiring domains do often loose a significant amount of links because they have expired. This can decrease the PageRank. You need to ensure that the links are still active or re-activate them to increase that domain’s PageRank once again.

Higher Google PageRank = Better Ranking?

This one is a bit more complicated. Technically yes and no are both answers to this question.

Yes - The higher your PageRank the more links you have pointing to them. Since link popularity is important for Google and other search engines algorithm this makes a higher PageRank equal a better overall ranking. Again while this is not the only factor to determine ranking it is an important one.

No - You can have a Google PageRank 4 with virtually no traffic and/or listings. Incoming links will increase your PageRank however; they may be on irrelevant pages which have absolutely nothing to do with the overall focus of your site.

Faked PageRank - Anyone can fake a PageRank.

It involves a simple 301 redirect to another domain and cloaking.

This is how it works?

When a spider crawls a URL the server redirects the spider to a page with a high rank. Google then assigns the higher PageRank to the page with the redirection because it assumes that the pages are the same or identical.

When a visitor goes to that web page URL, the server does NOT redirect the visitor. This means that the visitor sees the web page of the fakes and the Google toolbar will display the PageRank of the redirected URL.

To visitors this simply looks as if a specific web page has a really high PageRank although in truth it does not. This does not actually help to raise that particular page’s rank it just influences the PR display in the Google toolbar. After the next update you have and keep your PR until the next update again.

Please Note that this is a very unserious technique folks - don’t do that!

How to check fake Page rank?

Open Google.com:

and type in the search bar:

cache: www.domain.com

info: www.domain.com

If www.domain.com (and nor www.anotherdomain.com) returns then the page rank is valid.

or try to use an online tool like:

Valid Rank: http://www.validrank.com

No Follow - Links passing no value

If you do not want to pass your PageRank to external links that are located on your website there is a simple no-follow tag that you can implement:

E.g

<a rel="nofollow" href="http://www.external-domain.com/">anchor</a>

So how much additional PageRank do we need to move up the toolbar?

First, let me explain in more detail why the values shown in the Google toolbar are not the actual PageRank figures. According to the equation, and to the creators of Google, the billions of pages on the web average out to a PageRank of 1.0 per page. So the total PageRank on the web is equal to the number of pages on the web * 1, which equals a lot of PageRank spread around the web.

The Google toolbar range is from 1 to 10. (They sometimes show 0, but that figure isn’t believed to be a PageRank calculation result). What Google does is divide the full range of actual PageRanks on the web into 10 parts - each part is represented by a value as shown in the toolbar. So the toolbar values only show what part of the overall range a page’s PageRank is in, and not the actual PageRank itself. The numbers in the toolbar are just labels.

Whether or not the overall range is divided into 10 equal parts is a matter for debate - Google aren’t saying. But because it is much harder to move up a toolbar point at the higher end than it is at the lower end, many people (including me) believe that the divisions are based on a logarithmic scale, or something very similar, rather than the equal divisions of a linear scale.

Let’s assume that it is a logarithmic, base 10 scale, and that it takes 10 properly linked new pages to move a site’s important page up 1 toolbar point. It will take 100 new pages to move it up another point, 1000 new pages to move it up one more, 10,000 to the next, and so on. That’s why moving up at the lower end is much easier that at the higher end.

In reality, the base is unlikely to be 10. Some people think it is around the 5 or 6 mark, and maybe even less. Even so, it still gets progressively harder to move up a toolbar point at the higher end of the scale.

The toolbar value is a good indicator of a page’s PageRank but it only indicates that a page is in a certain range of the overall scale. One PR5 page could be just above the PR5 division and another PR5 page could be just below the PR6 division - almost a whole division (toolbar point) between them.

Finally

PageRank is, in fact, very simple (apart from one scary looking formula). But when a simple calculation is applied hundreds (or billions) of times over the results can seem complicated.

PageRank is also only part of the story about what results get displayed high up in a Google listing. For example there’s some evidence to suggest that Google also pays attention to the text in a link’s anchor when deciding the relevance of a target page – perhaps more so than the page’s PR…

PageRank is still part of the listings story though, so it’s worth your while as a good designer to make sure you understand it correctly.