What is PageRank?

PageRank is a unique feature of the Google search engine service. PageRank is available to your browser by installing the Google toolbar plugin, (available here).

New website owners often wonder about PageRank - what it is and why their website may not be achieving a high PageRank.

The theory or algorithm behind PageRank is what makes Google the leading search engine today. Prior to Google coming to the market, search engines would analyse meta tags, word density & page hit count plus some other "secret" stuff & use these criteria to organise their search results. This system was very open to manipulation. Before long, webmasters started using tiny text & hiding text behind layers to achieve high rankings.

Google's philosophy of returning results of value to the searcher brought about their page rank theory. Google decided the only true indication of the quality of your page was how many other sites linked to it. Each of these incoming links is concidered a vote for the content of your page. The more pages linking to yours, the more important your content must be. By assigning a score to this value, PageRank was born.

PageRank has a trickle down effect. A vote from a page of high importance/PageRank is seen as a stronger vote than a link from a page of low importance/PageRank. Furthermore, a one way link is seen as a specially strong vote for your site's content. A reciprocal link does not score as many PageRank points.

By its nature, the PageRank system is self regulating. In essence, to improve your website's page ranking you need sites with high PageRank to link to you, preferably without a return link.

Very few sites achieve a PageRank higher than 4 out of a possible 10. This is due to the logarithmic nature of PageRank. It is progressively more difficult to achieve a higher PageRank. Here is a good example of the difficulty in achieving high PageRank.

• Google has a page rank of 10.
• Australian Department of Foreign Affairs (www.dfat.gov.au) has a page rank of 7
• Sony (AU) has a page rank of 6.
  

You can see the sort of importance a site must reflect to gain a high ranking.

At the end of the day, PageRank is what separates sites in Google's organic searches. If someone searches for "apple ipod", for example, and all page factors (ie: density of the phrase "apple ipod" in the body of the page, prominence of the phrase, ie: use in text links, page title, headings etc) are equal, then Google will rate your site on PageRank. This said, according to Google engineer Matt Cutts, webmasters shouldn't get too obsessed with PageRank, he states that there are at least another 100 factors that dictate your search result position.

As explained, Google's hierarchy of results is based on the quality of sites that link to you. The more high PageRank sites that link to your website, the more important Google regards your website. This will lead to higher search engine results for your pages.

Strategically, the challenge is to find these high PageRank sites and try to convince them that your site is worthy of a one way link. Having a site with truly unique & original content can save you a lot of effort in attaining these links. Invest time in identifying these online relationships as the results pay great dividends. A link from a high ranking page may not necessarily lead to more traffic from the link itself, but its PageRank contribution is of considerable value.

Listing your site with directories such as DMOZ, exactseek and WebWombat can aid your PageRank. Again, this will generally not increase your traffic, but they all have a healthy PageRank.

Lastly, as with everything in SEO, we cannot emphasise enough that perseverance must be matched by patience. These relationships will not grow overnight, so allow for a campaign to cover a three to six month period before trying to gauge your success.