Fighting for more PageRank

I read this in one of the site I stumbled into..I find it quite interesting for some reasons...hope to have time to share why I am doing some readings and research of what really pagerank is???keep reading!!! wish everyone in advance a very great and blessed weekend!!!

Fighting for more PageRank

Keep in mind that the PageRank value is just one part of how Google determines which pages to show you when you search for something. I want to stress that point because so many people get really hung up on PageRank. A low PageRank is often an indicator of problems, and a high PageRank is an indicator that you’re doing something right, but PageRank itself is just a small part of how Google ranks your pages.

When you type a search term into Google and click Search, Google starts looking through its database for pages with the words you’ve typed. Then it examines each page to decide which pages are most relevant to your search. Google considers many characteristics: what the title/ tag says, how the keywords are treated (are they bold or italic or in bulleted lists?), where the keywords sit on the page, and so on. It also considers PageRank.

Clearly it’s possible for a page with a low PageRank to rank higher than one with a high PageRank in some searches. When that happens, it simply means that the value provided by the high PageRank isn’t enough to outweigh the value of all the other characteristics of the page that Google considered.

I like to think of PageRank as a tiebreaker. Imagine a situation in which you have a page that, using all other forms of measurement, ranks as equally well as a competitor’s page.

Google has looked at both pages, found the same number of keywords in the same sorts of positions, and thinks both pages are equally good matches for a particular keyword search. However, your competitor’s page has a higher PageRank than yours.

Which page will rank higher in a Google search for that keyword? Your competitor’s. Many people claim PageRank isn’t important, and that site owners often focus too much on PageRank (that may be true). But PageRank, or something similar, definitely is a factor. As Google has said:

“The heart of our software is PageRank(tm), a system for ranking web pages developed by our founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. And while we have dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of Google on a daily basis, PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of our web search tools.”

By the way, you could be forgiven for thinking PageRank document, Larry Page. (The other that the term PageRankcomes from the idea of, founder is Sergey Brin.) The truth is probably well, ranking pages. Google claims, however, somewhere in between. Otherwise, why isn’t it that it comes from the name of one of the the PageBrinRank?

The PageRank algorithm

I want to quickly show you the PageRank algorithm; but don’t worry, I’m not going to get hung up on it. In fact, you really don’t need to be able to read and follow it, as I explain in a moment. Here it is:

PR (A) = (1 – d) + d (PR (t1) / C (t1) + … + PR (tn) / C (tn))

Where:

PR = PageRank
A = Web page A
d = A damping factor, usually set to 0.85
t1…tn = Pages linking to Web page A
C = The number of outbound links from page tn

I could explain all this to you, honestly I could. But I don’t want to. And furthermore, I don’t have to because you don’t need to be able to read the algorithm.

Rather than take you through the PageRank algorithm step by step, here are a few key points that explain more or less how it works:

As soon as a page enters the Google index, it has an intrinsic PageRank. Admittedly, the PageRank is very small, but it’s there.

A page has a PageRank only if it’s indexed by Google. Links to your site from pages that have not yet been indexed are effectively worthless, as far as PageRank goes.

When you place a link on a page, pointing to another page, the page with the link is voting for the page it’s pointing to. These votes are how PageRank increases. As a page gets more and more links into it, its PageRank grows.

Linking to another page doesn’t reduce the PageRank of the origin page, but it does increase the PageRank of the receiving page. It’s sort of like a company’s shareholders meeting, at which people with more shares have more votes. They don’t lose their shares when they vote. But the more shares they have, the more votes they can place.

Pages with no links out of them are wasting PageRank; they don’t get to vote for other pages. Because a page’s inherent PageRank is not terribly high, this isn’t normally a problem. It becomes a problem if you have a large number of links to dangling pages of this kind. Or it can be a problem if you have a dangling page with a high PageRank.

Though rare, this could happen if you have a page that many external sites link to that then links directly to an area of your site that won’t benefit from PageRank, such as a complex e-commerce catalog system that Google can’t index or an external e-commerce system hosted on another site. Unless the page links to other pages inside your Web site, it won’t be voting for those pages and thus won’t be able to raise their PageRank.

A single link from a dangling page can channel that PageRank back into your site. Make sure that all your pages have at least one link back into the site. This usually isn’t a problem because most sites are built with common navigation bars and often text links at the bottom of the page.

source: stylishdesign