Pagerank … Wah, Good God Y’all – What is it Good For?

If you are just starting out on your SEO journey, you are probably wondering what all the fuss about PageRank is. Who cares what one website thinks about another, after all? Isn’t it your customers that truly matter?

Links=PageRank

Well, when the website is Google and you are trying to rank highly in it, it certainly does matter. Today we run through the basics of Pagerank – who the heck it is, and what it’s good for .

What is Pagerank?

PageRank can actually be explained quite simply – it is a measure of all of the inbound links coming to your website or blog. Google figures that the greater the number of other sites that are linking to yours, the more people must feel that your website has something worthy on it.

Every link is sort of like a ‘vote’ for your site – saying that you have something worthwhile related to your topic. This judgement of worth is something that Google’s computers simply cannot do … as powerful as they are. So they use links to create PageRank, and PageRank is part of what goes into your search engine ranking results.

How is PageRank Calculated?

Here is the formula for calculating PageRank that was published when the concept was first launched … not that too many people bother with using it! It is likely that the formula has now changed, and is as top secret as the 11 famous herbs and spices.

Nevertheless, this is a good approximation:

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + … + PR(tn)/C(tn))

Notes: t1 … tn are pages linking to your site. C is your site. D is a damping factor, usually 0.85, which is why is is so hard to get to PR10!

Increasing your PageRank

The way to increase your PageRank is to keep up with your link building activities to get plejnty of inbound links, and to ensure that you don’t link out to sites that have a PageRank of less than 1. It is possible that Google has penalized them, and may also penalize you for promoting them.

A word of warning…

If you are looking for serous advice on increasing your PageRank, go to a web marketing expert … not a site called www.pr10.com (link deliberately omitted!). All of the techniques listed are black hat, though there is no indication that it is as such. There is also no indication that the text is sarcastic. We hope it hasn’t caught out too many people!