All about Google page rank

Published: October 23, 2009
All about Google page rank

There’s been a lot of talk around page rank and how it’s importance might be decreasing. Still, we still have many webmasters who ask how does pagerank affect my website’s visibility in Google and why page rank is important? We attempt to answer some top questions around the subject of page rank in the next few days. We can’t be too sure about how many parts will be there to this series, because there is a lot to talk about. Please use the comments section below to ask your questions so we can address them before we are done with the series. Let’s begin with the basics :

What is page rank?

Page rank is Google’s way of deciding the importance of a page, which is also popularly referred to as authority. A page’s rank is largely dependent on the number of links that point to that page from other pages on the web. Google uses sophisticated algorithms to determine the pagerank of any given page. Pagerank also gets affected by the quality of incoming links for the page. For example, if page A has 20 incoming links from pages with pagerank 1 and page B has 10 incoming links from pages with pagerank 3, then page B will be have a higher pagerank than page A. In this way, Google also considers the flow of pagerank from one page to another.

How does page rank affect my website?

Google uses pagerank to determine the ranking of your site in it’s search results. So all other things being equal, higher page rank pages will appear higher in Google search results. This leads to more visitors coming to your site, without you spending anything on advertising. Visitors who come to your site through search results are also easier to convert because they were looking for information you could provide. So whatever it is that your website aims to convert visitors to; paying members, subscribers, closed sales or anything else, it will do better. This is the reason why a lot of emphasis is placed on getting higher pagerank.

Websites with higher pagerank also tend to get crawled by Google more often. So if you have a site where you publish breaking news, make sure there is a page on you website with high pagerank, that links to the latest news pages. This way, even if the news page has no pagerank (because it just got published and has no external links pointing to it) it will still get crawled and indexed fast. You can also get pages updated faster by making changes in your sitemap and crawl speed changes in Google webmaster tools, but they are out of scope of this article and will be discussed later.

Is there a pagerank for my site?

A common misconception is that the pagerank of the homepage of the site, is the pagerank of the entire site. Google ranks individual pages for their importance and not entire websites. Google considers each page as a separate document,  so cramming too much information in one webpage might hamper Google’s search efficiency instead of increasing it. Design your content in such a way that each page has it’s own importance and link value. A cascading effect of the pagerank of the homepage will also increase the pagerank of pages linked to it, but this should never be the intent of your site’s design. Since the homepage is usually linked to from every page of your website, focus on getting links to point to your pages and thus increasing the pagerank of the homepage.

Will any incoming links do?

In Google’s algorithm, all links are not equal. Google considers links equivalent to citations in academic work. So while you create may original content, Google will consider all links leading out of your page to be citations to other content. There’s a way to tell Google which links are citations and which ones are not, using the nofollow attribute. This attribute, when used with a link, tells Google that you do not necessarily vouch for the content one might find on that link and that you do not want the linked page to get advantage of your page’s pagerank. While we advise not to use this attribute for any links on your site as a part of our link building strategy, you should use them for any “bad examples” you link to. Basically, you should always try to get links from reputed pages and avoid links from “bad neighborhoods” of the web. Passing pagerank, by not using the nofollow attribute, might give you page a pagerank penalty.

Great, let’s buy some links!

Not so fast! Google does not place much value on links purchased from sites that sell links to you. In most cases, Google already knows about the sites which indulge in selling of links and has already discredited outgoing links from such sites, and new sites for such businesses are found and discredited everyday. While your page does not get penalized if you receive incoming links from such “bad neighborhood sites”, but linking to such sites (especially without the nofollow attribute) will harm your site’s reputation.

So how do I get incoming links?

Before you go on getting links, you need to know which pages you should get links to, and how to efficiently flow pagerank within your site to get the maximum advantage from every incoming link. You also need to know how to efficiently link to other sites. For now, focus on building great content which people would want to use as citations. Our upcoming guide to getting links from other sites will help you get some great links.

How do I keep a check on incoming links?

Google webmaster tools provides a great way to check the number of incoming links to your site. They display all the links you receive without the nofollow attribute and also the anchor text the links are contained in. More on this in an upcoming guide on how to build incoming links for your website.

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