What Is Google PageRank?

I bet you have heard “Google PageRank” thousand times. But, what is Google PageRank actually? To have a high Google PageRank has been a dream for many bloggers, both the guru and newbie like me. Google PageRank is a rank of a certain page – named after one of the founders of the Google search engine, compared to other pages on the net. That’s not something new. I’m quite sure that you have already know that.

Here is the theory, when a web page “A” links to a web page “B”, means that web page “A” is voting web page “B”. It is based on the reason that webmasters or bloggers will only link to pages taht they thought were interesting and giving good value to their visitors. The more a web page has links, the more it regarded as an important page. Google uses the number of inbound links (IBL) to a page to judge the importance and relevance of that page, and based on this calculation, and other factors, decided where to place that page on the search results page (SERP).

The result of their measurements combined and this is what we called as the PageRank, that has 1 to 10 value. Then for the information of webmasters and interested people they produced a toolbar that can be deployed in some internet browsers that shows the PageRank value of any page being viewed in the browser. These values have become known as PR0 to PR10.

Since PR values are a result of IBLs, Google decided to give them their own name and refers to inbound links as backlinks. As part of the toolbar there is a quick lookup of the number of backlinks that Google reports for the page that is currently being viewed in the browser. This search can also be done without the aid of the toolbar by simply typing "link:http://www.yourURL.com" into the Google search box. Try it once.

The one trick to this link search is that Google does not display all backlinks. At one time it was thought that they only listed pages with a value of PR4 or greater. Today however, we will find backlinks reported from pages of lower PR values. So, at best, Google's backlink search seems to present some sample of pages linking to the site. Suffice it to say that this search is not a reliable measure of all IBLs to a page.

But, this is only a big and rough explanation on what Google PageRank is. No one really sure. The next question is how Google calculate the PageRank? And finally comes the most important thing for us: how to get a higher Google PageRank?

Are you an SEO expert? or simply a beginner on blogging like me? Please share your thought ….

Share this post :