Understanding Google Page Rank

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Almost everyone knows that Google is far and away the King of the Search Engine universe. Google controls about 80% of the search market — a true “800 pound gorilla” in its field. But did you ever wonder how they got to that plateau? What did they bring to the game that left their competitors choking in the dust? Page Rank, or PR as it is now called.

The Philosophy behind Page Rank

Think of the World Wide Web as a new marketplace where the major commodity traded is information. As is the case with all free markets they attract both the good and the bad. There are those who have legitimate offerings in the marketplace and those who flood the market with garbage, with profit at any cost as their only goal.

What Page Rank Does

Prior to Google’s introducing their patented PageRank technology in 1998 much of the Search Engine world focused almost exclusively on relevance. If a search query matched keywords on a website it was considered relevant to the visitor’s needs and ranked high in the SERP (Search Engine Results Page). PageRank added the concept of popularity to the mix. PageRank is a very complex mathematical calculation that essentially counts the number of “votes” a page in a website receives from other Internet pages and then assigns a quality rating to each vote. Google founders see the World Wide Web as a legitimate free market for information where the will of the people is heard by the “votes” they cast for a particular web page. If one Visitor site recommends that its visitors check out another site, a link between the pages of the site is established. That is a vote of confidence in the quality of the page within another site that is being recommended. But quantity of votes was not enough for the originators of PageRank. The quality of the referring site was also important. As an example, if your site provides software services, a link from Microsoft or Oracle is rated higher by Google PageRank than a link from Sam’s Software and Hot Dog Emporium.

The implications should be clear to Website owners: establish links between the pages of your website and other quality sites on the Internet. The hucksters and scammers poured into this arena very quickly after PageRank came on the scene with elaborate measures designed to trick Google into thinking a website was more popular than it really was. Link farms are an example. Link farms are groups of websites that hyperlink to each other and in some cases the sites are actually duplicates. The whole scheme was designed to make it look like a huge number of Internet visitors were recommending the site. If you are interested in increasing traffic by building links to quality sites, begin by asking yourself why an Internet visitor would suggest a link to another site in the first place. The answer should be obvious: because the visitor sees something of value in the linked site. So before you begin looking for links, look first to the pages within your website and ask yourself if they are good enough to be recommended. Good luck!

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