There is a lot of talk in SEO circles these days about Google’s PageRank. I hear questions on a daily basis about PageRank.
What is my PageRank? How can I get my PageRank higher? How can I improve my PageRank? Can I ever succeed without a high PageRank? How much does it cost to get a PageRank? Who decides my PageRank and why don’t they like me?
First of all, settle down, take a deep breath and relax. PageRank is not what you think it is. Is PageRank important? Yes, of course it is. Google uses PageRank to simplify the many weighting factors it takes in to account when it indexes millions of sites. PageRank tells Google which sites have certain ranking factors that Google finds important.
Can you be successful without a good PageRank?
Yes you can. PageRank doesn’t ask you to do things which will make it harder to get traffic or harder to make money. PageRank has your best interests and those of your clients at heart. If you build a great site that is SEO friendly and easy to navigate and full of rich useful content, your PageRank will reflect that.
Google describes PageRank in the following way.
“PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.”
PageRank is named after Larry Page who co-invented it at Stanford University with Sergey Brin. The patent for PageRank is owned by Stanford University. However, Google received exclusive license rights to it in exchange for 1.8 million shares of Google. Which Stanford sold in 2005 for a whopping $336 million dollars!
PageRank is used by Google as a numerical weighting system for webpages. Google essentially figures that if one page links to another page, it is casting a vote for the other page. The more votes that are cast for that page the more important that page must be. Also the importance of the page that is casting the vote determines how important the vote itself actually is. The importance of each vote is taken into consideration when PageRank is calculated.
PageRank is Google’s way of determining a pages importance and authority online. The reason PageRank matters is because it is one of many factors that determines the page’s importance in search results. While PageRank is just one of the factors for Google search results it continues to provide the basis for all of Google’s web search tools. You can obtain a good page rank by generating valid unique content on your website. Google will increase your page rank over time. It is not an overnight thing. The best thing to do is build great quality back-links to your site. At Boostability 90% of what we do is build back-links. We strive to find the best places to build links to your site.
