Google’s PageRank System

A lot of people are talking about PageRank, Google’s system of determining whose website ranks higher in the search engine. Google defines PageRank as “system for ranking web pages”. How? Google ranks your page based on the number of high quality pages that link to your site. The idea is that, the more higher ranked pages that link to your site, the better your results in Google.

Makes sense. That is how the web is built and works – linking from one page or website with another. No wonder why Google is the most successful search engine.

Anyhoo…

I wanted to share with you some interesting items that will help define PageRank a little better and some tools to help analyze your website ranking (and possibly get it higher).

1. An excellent article on PageRank and the misconceptions of PageRank against Link Popularity – the essence of building links to your website.
2. A tool I especially like is Prog. Prog? (I’m surprised it is not utilized on Google). Prog, a search engine powered by Google, will display the PageRank results of all your searches. So when testing out your keywords, you can compare PageRank against your competitors.
3. If (and I mean IF), you use Internet Explorer on a Windows platform, you can download the Google Toolbar and incorporate PageRank display. When searching sites, this will help determine what PageRank status they are (0 to 9. 9 being the best). It’s a quick and simple method. If you are not using IE, use Prog mentioned above.
4. Another tool I just found out about helps calculate how many high quality links you need to increase your PageRank rating. If you want a PageRank of 4, all you need is one website with a PageRank of 6 to link to yours.

It’s not only the quantity of links to your site, but the quality. To put it simply, the more relevant pages that link to your site, the higher your website will be in Google’s search results.