What is Google PageRank?

All major search engines value incoming links to a site and use this as one of their key determinants as to how highly a site appears in their search results. Google's version of this is called 'PageRank'.

The main use of the Google PageRank is to determine how valuable a link would be from another web page.

How well your site is optimized for search engines and if the links from other sites contain relevant keywords are also big factors that Google takes into account, though this won't effect the PageRank of a page.  Google looks at whether links are from forums or directories, if they're relevant, how many times different keywords appear on a page and many other different factors.

Obviously what your keyword is will depend on how competitive it is and therefore how many high quality incoming links you'd need to appear first.  Keywords like 'car' or 'holiday' will be more competitive than keywords like 'scarf' or 'tortoise'.

The PageRank is only a measure of link popularity, it does NOT measure individual keywords or the overall appearance of a site.  It also doesn't measure the overall quality of a site (though a high PageRank implies a high quality site, as it tells you that many other websites link to a site, which is why Google uses it).

The more outgoing links you have from a website, the lower the PageRank will be, therefore incoming links increase Google PageRank, whereas outgoing links reduce Google PageRank.  Provided your outgoing links are relevant, this reduction in Google PageRank won't however reduce your position in the search results.

To find out what the Page Rank of any website (or more specifically, web page) is, please type in the domain name below and press Check. You'll need to include the www if the site uses this.

 

Google

 

 

List of PageRank update dates 2010

Google updates the visible PageRank it shows people once every 2-3 months or so, though sometimes it's much quicker than this and sometimes it's longer.  The dates that PageRank updates have occurred in the past (in reverse order) are:

2010
13 February 2010
2 April 2010
1 July 2010

2009
31 December 2009
30 October 2009
23 June 2009
27 May 2009
1 April 2009

2008
31 December 2008
27 September 2008
26 July 2008
29 April 2008
10 January 2008

To date their has only been one 2010 PageRank update.

 

How is it calculated?

Google PageRank update dates 2010 PageRank (PR) is an exponential scale from 0 to 10, meaning that more links are required to meet each rank after the 1st. Different links give different 'boost' to your PageRank (for instance links from Directories either don't count or count less than links from normal websites), so there's no simple formula to calculate it, but depending on the links, it's something like:

PR1 - 10 links
PR2 - 11 - 100 links
PR3 - 101 - 1,000 links
PR4 - 1,001 - 10,000 links
Etc.

Wikipedia.org and google.co.uk are both PR8, Google.com and only a handful of other sites are PR10.

Broadly speaking, the higher your PageRank, the higher you will appear in the search results and the higher the PageRank of a link going to your website, the more 'boost' it will give you.

If your site has a Page Rank of 2 or higher, that is normally sufficient for it to appear well for a range of specific, yet relevant search results - provided that is has good Search Engine Optimization and is not in a highly competitive category (such as website design itself). If it is, a Page Rank of 3, 4 or more may be required.  Similarly if your site covers very different subjects or a large geographical area, it may be necessary to have more links going to your site in order for it to appear well for the range of subjects.

Every page on your site can have a different PageRank.  Generally the home page will have a PageRank that is one higher than other internal pages that have lots of links to them (e.g. PR3 home, PR2 internal pages).  Pages with fewer links going to them internally will also have a lower PageRank, unless they have lots of links from other websites.

 

 

 

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