What is Pagerank?

Every search engine has some way of ranking your site in the listings, whether it is by relevancy, by popularity, or something else. There are rules, computers don't know how to do things without rules, and search engines are nothing more than computer programming. A couple of the biggies though, put a lot of thought into how to exactly prioritize your site in the listings. Two of them get a lot of attention for published rankings, but the other biggies also have a pagerank system, even though it is not talked about.

The two that get the attention are Alexa, who gives you a number based on which listing number your site falls at (the larger the number, the worse off you are), and Google, who ranks your site based on their own private algorithm. For most search engine experts, the one that matters, is Google. And when someone cites their pagerank to you, it is Google they are going to be citing.

MSN and Yahoo do use some of the same criteria for determining search listing position that Google does, but they have not made such an issue of it.

The Google PageRank works something like this:

Based on site relevancy (determined by content), and site popularity (determined by incoming links), they will assign you a specific rank, from 1-10. One is the lowest, 10 is the highest. Of course, they assign you a decimal number, but when you are able to get your pagerank from a pagerank checker, it is just the whole number.

A site starts off with 0. It only has 0 when it is brand new, and has not been ranked yet. It may be indexed for quite some time before it is ranked. I have sites that are 4-5 months old, which still have a pagerank of 0. Once it has been indexed, it will generally have a pagerank of 1, because anything over 0 is rounded to 1. To get any more than that, you have to do some work.

With Google, the part of the PageRank that you can affect the most, is inbound links – links on other sites that point to your site. They take a count of the inbound links, and they give you credit for popularity based on those. Now, there are, reputedly, a WHOLE bunch of things that can affect inbound link values (I'll cover those in the next chapter), some of which you need to be concerned about, some not. But basically, the rule is, the more good quality inbound links you have, the higher your pagerank.

The ranking reputedly increases exponentially, so that you have to increase by a large multiple to go from 1 to 2, then from 2 to 3, etc. This means that the higher you get, the harder it is to get the next rank. It is not hard to get from 1 to 2. It takes some work to get a 3, and some serious work to get a 4. Higher than that for a small business site takes some time, and consistent effort.

Now, because Google and the other big search engines pay so much attention to inbound links, of course there are those who have tried to manipulate the search engines using fraudulent or purchased inbound links. We are not talking about finding a site with similar content and negotiating a purchase price for placing a link on the site. We are talking about “pay me and I'll put your link on 2000 pages!” and that sort of thing – instant huge numbers.

Or people who build 100 of the same site, put them all in different domains, and cross link them to each other. No, that won't work either, because Google doesn't seem to pay much attention to links on new sites, but they do on established sites.

If you purchase a website with a domain, then you'll want to know the pagerank before you buy, and to check to see if it has not been banned if the pagerank is 0. Because banned sites have NO pagerank. And a site with low pagerank is worth less than one with high pagerank. You also need to know how to check it before advertising on someone else's site so you'll have some idea of the worth of the ad.

There is a lot of complexity in the PageRank issue, and a lot of controversy as well. The important thing from this chapter is to understand that the factor that you need to know about is inbound links.