What is Google PageRank and why do I care?

Google’s PageRank is simply a number from 1 to 10, 10 being the best. That’s what it is — so why is this important? The higher a page’s PageRank is, the more likely it will show up first in Google’s search results. The higher a page is listed in the search results, the more likely people will see it and go to that page when they are looking for something.

How is PageRank calculated?

In the simplest terms, PageRank is the popularity, or relevance of any given page on the Internet. There is a very complicated algorithm behind it, which most people would find confusing, but it boils down to a popularity contest.

Think of it like this: if everyone posted a link to their favorite social networking profile on their blog, you would have a bunch of votes for Facebook, Friendster, and Xanga, etc. from all those blogs. When Google’s web crawler, named “Googlebot” is crawling the web it sees these links. Each link to Facebook is counted as a vote. And each link to Friendstar is also seen as a vote, and so on.

Now it gets complicated, because each “vote” from the different blogs carries a different amount of weight, depending on the popularity of those blogs. So if a highly popular blog has a link to a Friendster profile on it, that would count as a bigger vote than a not so popular blog’s link to a Facebook profile. And since the popularity of blogs change over time, the weight of their votes can change over time. But don’t worry, all the votes count for something. So almost any link to your page would carry some value. Just know that links to your page from a high PageRank page will be worth a lot more than a link from a low PageRank page.

How PageRank works in Practice

All this might sound confusing but in practice PageRank works very much like human interaction: There are lots of votes of different values. Just like in social circles or even politics, the well respected and popular people’s opinion about other people in the group can make or break the popularity of the other individuals in the group. The more votes you have, the more popular you become. And the more popular you become, the more value your own votes start to carry. As time goes on and the more good and relevant content your pages contain, the more your own votes count. So PageRank is not only earned, it can be passed on. And just like in politics, if a scandal breaks your popularity can decline and along with it, the votes you have given to others will count for less and less.