How Google PageRank Works

Google's way of rating websites is called PageRank. It's their own system and not all search engines provide tools like PageRank and it's technically a secret how it works but there is a lot that we do know. Pages (not just sites but individual pages) with a higher PageRank rank higher in search engine results pages (SERPs). So the million dollar questions are:

• How does PageRank work?
• How can I get a higher PageRank?

I found a good website that answers a lot about PageRank (PR). I'll summarize some key points here but feel free to follow the links below and learn more.

Factors that increase PageRank:

• How often your pages are updated. Pages updated more often obviously get a higher PR.
• How often you add pages to your website. If you update your site more often, you get a higher PR.
• What kind of inbound links you have - what is the PR of the page that links to your page? The higher, the better.
• Does your page contain broken links? No broken links is best - Google wants to give the best results to people, remember.

Factors that decrease PageRank:

• Inbound links from questionable sites.
• Link spamming - too many links in too many places from unrelated websites.
• Broken links.

We do know that inbound links are VERY important to PR. It may be 70% or more of the score. Any inbound link from a relevant page is good but you want to watch how many other links are on that page. The fewer, the better:

...it would be better to get a page linked to you that has a PageRank of 5 with 2 outbound links then it would be to have a page linked to you with a PageRank of 8 with 500 outbound links, but don't get me wrong. It would be better to have both pages linked to you, but if you was to take your choice, think about it.

So there's just a taste of how it works. If you want to dig into PageRank, the info is out there. Here are the links I promised:

• Google PageRank Explained
• How many links do you need to get a certain pagerank?
• PageRank as explained by Google
• PageRank Technology

Have a nice weekend!
-Tony