Google Page Rank
Google Page Rank measures website importance on a scale from 0 to 10.
Google Pagerank is one of the most popular measures of search engine optimisation success, but also one of the most commonly misunderstood.
Glasgow Web Design believe that increasing your search engine rankings should be your priority when carrying out SEO, though our search engine optimisation work will normally also increase page rank too. For more information about Google Page Rank please call us now on 0141 424 3408.
Examples of Page Rank
Page Rank values go up and down frequently, but here are some examples of websites and their representative pagerank values:
- PR 10: Google [ Google.com ]
- PR 9: University of Cambridge [ cam.ac.uk ]
- PR 8: University of Glasgow [ gla.ac.uk ]
- PR 7: Glasgow Caledonian University [ gcal.ac.uk ]
- PR 6: Glasgow City Council [ glasgow.gov.uk ]
- PR 5: Glasgow Chamber of Commerce [ glasgowchamber.org ]
- ...
- PR 0: Any new website
Pagerank Explained
Google developed the Pagerank system based on a very simple principle; if you have a set of documents that refer to one another, the one that is mentioned the most is likely to be the most important. So essentially Pagerank measures the importance of a webpage by looking at the number of links to that webpage from other webpages. A common analogy is that by linking to another web page you are 'voting' for it, and pages with the most votes are the most important.
Google Pagerank was originally part of a Stanford University research project and made use of earlier work analysing references between scientific research papers. However the pagerank formula has changed dramatically in subsequent years in order to cope with the task of providing high quality search results for the Google search engine. A major factor in the recent changes has been to eliminate spam websites from the index. Today Google's Pagerank algorithm considers over 200 variables and aims to provide search results that are both relevant and high quality.
Pagerank can be checked using the Google Toolbar or using an online pagerank checker.
Google Pagerank Misunderstandings
There are a number of dangerous misunderstandings about Google Page Rank, and the SEO community is still divided over how much importance to place on Pagerank as a measure of SEO success.
The first problem is that Google Pagerank is actually a logarithmic scale, rather than a linear scale. If it was a linear scale then a website with a pagerank of four would be twice as important as a website with a pagerank of two. But a website with pagerank of four is actually treated as being around 100 times as important as the pagerank two site. The exact ratio is only known to Google, but a good estimate is that a single point increase in pagerank corresponds to around a tenfold increase in website importance.
The second problem is that the pagerank value Google publishes is updated infrequently. The published pagerank value is only updated every few months, whereas the values internally used by Google to generate search engine results are recalculated constantly. So there can actually be quite a significant difference between the published and actual pagerank values.
The final and most serious problem is that simply having a high Page Rank does not guarantee that your website will automatically rank highly in the search engine results. You can check this yourself by performing some searches and examining the Page Rank values of the websites returned. While the top results will include some high Page Rank websites, there will also be several high ranking websites that have less Page Rank. And the top ten results are clearly not listed in order of Page Rank values.
Increase Page Rank
Many people look to increase page rank as the focus of a search engine optimisation campaign. But it is better to focus on improving your search engine rankings directly as this will attract more visitors, meaning more money in your pocket. To improve page rank on its own is wasted effort without also improving your search results.
The key point is that there is a lot more to effective search engine optimisation than simply getting a high Google Page Rank value. For more information about Google Page Rank and how it affects your website please call now on 0141 424 3408.
