How Page Rank Works

PageRank is a rating system developed (and trademarked) by Google which was developed to assign an overall rating system to websites on the internet.

The rating system takes into consideration factors such as how many sites are linking to the home and inner pages. The PageRank of the sites linking to your site are taken into consideration, so a site higher PageRank is going to have more of an effect on your rank than a lower PageRank site. The number of visitors to the website does not appear to be a factor in the ranking of the website.

Here Google defines PageRank: "PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weigh more heavily and help to make other pages "important".

Although Google doesn't state this directly, it is an empirical fact that the time the website has been around is taken into account when ranking a website. The whole purpose of PageRank is that Google can weed out people attempting to spam the search engines by setting up multitudes of websites that aren't actually providing value to the users of Google.

There are many other factors taken into consideration when Google decides who shows up higher in the search engines than just PageRank, although it is one of the factors considered. This is the subject of another blog post, I just wanted to point this out so you don't think that PageRank is the ONLY factor taken when deciding where your website stands in the search engines.

How do I find out what my PageRank is?

There are a few free tools out there to find out the page rank of websites.
1. Google Toolbar. This tool is installed as a toolbar on your browser, so you get to see the PageRank of any website you go to instantly and automatically. Out of all the tools, this one is my favorite.
2. IWebTool.com PageRank Tool. Enter your website URL in at the field there and click on the "Check" button. You will see your PageRank at the top of the page. You will also see a lot of bars next to the links on the page with different numbers. This shows you the PageRank of those specific pages without even having to enter in those specific pages to the tool.
3. PageRankTool.net. This tool checks your PageRank at the different Google data centers. As a note: I have used this tool many times and have never seen a discrepancy between the different data centers but it can be good to see if your websites' PageRank is changing as it may change in certain data centers before it changes in others.

How long do I have to wait before I see changes on my PageRank?

PageRank has a long lag on when it updates. You may do a lot to your website to improve it's PageRank and natural links for the search engines and not see any changes for up to 6 months or longer for your PageRank to be updated. This is going to just depend on Google.

Recommendations

There are a few things you can do to improve your websites' PageRank:
1. Writing additional pages to your website. This can be sub divided into two parts:
   • Adding Pages: Adding pages to your website can be a great way to increase the amount of terms your website is showing up in in the search engines. It is also proven to be a great way to increase your PageRank as you are generating more content for the search engines to find. The "simple 10 page website" is a strategy of the past.
   • Blogging: Blogging has proven to be a great way to improve your website in the search engines as well as give people a personal insight to your company, making you more real to them. Search engines are biased towards blogs just because of their nature of constantly generating new content for it to search as well as many blog platforms now automatically "ping" the search engines to let them know you have new content when you post a new blog post.
2. Getting links to your site. The most common, legitimate ways to do this are:
   • Link Exchange: This is a strategy of finding websites in related industries to yours (generally not competitors) and asking them if they would put a link on their website in exchange for you putting a link on your website. You don't want to be doing link exchanges with people who have low PageRank. Make sure you check their PageRank as covered above before asking for a link exchange. It's important to do link exchanges with related sites, otherwise Google may suspect that you are getting illegitimate links, i.e. having a link exchange between a marketing company and shoe store.
   • Article Marketing: This strategy can be very effective, although it also can take some work. Article Marketing is writing articles related to your industry and publishing them on article directories (sites that collect up articles). Writing articles doesn't have to take a long time once you get the hang of it. Submitting the articles to these article directories can take many hours. I have developed an article submission service to take the work off your plate of the submission process. This is definitely worth the money as it was developed to be able to service people from literally any range of budget.
   • Social Media: Using sites like FaceBook.com, Social Bookmarking sites forums and blog comments, you can gain links back to your site which will help improve your PageRank and search engine rank for your website.
3. Be patient. If you try to rush the process, sign up with a black hat SEO "professional" or try to cut the process, it almost always ends up in a loss in rankings or being completed removed (blacklisted) from the search engines.

I hope this answers your basic questions on PageRank.

Rafferty Pendery
Internet Marketing Consultant

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