If
you're a website owner and you're trying to get organic search engine traffic
then you've probably heard the term "Google Pagerank". But what is
Pagerank and how does a websites pagerank effect search engine rankings? In
this article I'll address those questions and try to give you some insight into
this often confusing topic.
What is
Google pagerank?
Google
developed the "pagerank" system several years ago for the purpose of
gauging how "important" a web page is. The higher the pagerank, the
more "important" Google thinks the webpage is. Google uses this gauge
as a part of its ranking algorithm.
Where
does pagerank come from?
Pagerank
is all about webpages linking to other webpages. You see, every page that
Google indexes has a pagerank value associated with it. Every time one page
links to another page, a portion of that pagerank value "passes" to
the page it links to. Higher ranking pages, pass more pagerank to the pages
they link to.
What
happens is, when one page links to another page, it's kind of like the page
that does the linking is voting for the other page. So to get pagerank to your
webpage, all you have to do is get other pages to link to it.
Pagerank
is really just a mathematical calculation that determines how
"important" a webpage is based on how "important" the pages
that link to it are.
A
crucial point here that is often misunderstood is that pagerank is passed on a
page by page basis. Many webmasters assume that a sites pagerank is determined
by its home page. While it's true that the homepage is often the highest
ranking page within a website, it doesn't have to be. Any page on a given
website could rank higher then the homepage.
The myth
that the homepage will have the highest pagerank comes from the fact that many
webmasters (especially old school webmasters) participated in reciprocal
linking programs where they would exchange links to each others homepages. So,
by default, the homepage wound up with the highest pagerank simply because it
had the most links pointing to it.
So how
will my pagerank affect my search engine rankings?
Pagerank
is simply not as powerful as it once was. There was a time when all you had to
do to rank well was to get enough websites to link to you and you could
dominate virtually any listing you wanted. Today, the ranking algorithm is much
more complex. Many other factors are taken into account. However, pagerank does
still play a reasonably important roll so getting backlinks is still a major
task in the search engine optimization world. It's just that the way we go
about getting those links has changed.
How do I
check a sites pagerank?
Google
offers a free toolbar that you can download and install on your machine. One of
the things this toolbar does is to display the Pagerank of whatever webpage
you're looking at.
One
final note, my recommendation is to never worry too much about Pagerank. Build
your website to the best of your ability; create well written, compelling web
pages and you'll get backlinks naturally. Further, take some of your better
articles and submit them to a few article directories - include a resource box
which links back to your site and you'll get some excellent backlinks pretty
quickly. Just stay away from reciprocal linking campaigns, whatever benefit
they once had is long gone.
David
Olsen has been an Internet Marketer since 1999. In his career he has developed
well over one hundred affiliate websites and promoted dozens of products. He is
an expert in SEO and writes extensively about it at his flagship website,
D-Olsen.com