How Google’s PageRank Works

If you’ve ever used the superb Google Toolbar, you’ve probably noticed the PageRank “thermometer” that changes when you move from page to page.

This same PageRank is used to weight a page’s placement in Google’s search engine listings.

Since Google is one of the best sources of qualified traffic on the net, it is important to understand how your site is ranked via pagerank. The gory details are explained in this article, along with at least an approximation of the forumla used to calculate the rank.

The abbreviated version is that PageRank is an indicator of “Link Popularity” — you gan PageRank as a percentage of the PageRank of sites that link to you, divided by the number of outbound links on the site linking to you. So if you are linked to by a page with a very high rank and few other links, you get a substantial boost to your PageRank.

This means is a link from another page increases your site’s rank, as long as the site linking to you isn’t essentially a “link farm”.

There is a PageRank for each page on the site, and a PageRank for the site itself, based on the internal pages and how they are linked to from each other and from the outside world.

The maximum amount of PageRank for a site increases as the number of unique pages in the site increases. “Cookie Cutter” pages, however, can cause the PageRank of the page or the entire site to be penalized.

How this maximum PageRank is applied to the site is dependant on how the pages in the site link to each other. The article mentioned above gives example scenarios with explanations, as well as a calculator to allow you to play “what if” with different variations. Ther site also covers a lot of potential “gotchas” and esoteric issues that can be important if you’re really aiming to maximize your site’s Google placement.