What is Page Rank from Google?

You have seen page rank on most websites that you have visited, but what does it really mean?

Page Rank is a system used by the biggest search engine of all, Google. Google uses an algorithm that assigns a numerical weight to the set of linked documents within the Internet, or in simpler terms gives every website a ranking from 0 to 10, with 0 being at the bottom of the rankings and 10 being the highest possible score.

Most websites on the internet will have a page rank between 0 and 7, with only the biggest and most important websites achieving a page rank of 8 or 9 such as Adobe.com, Google.com and Yahoo.com for example.

As you can imagine there are no websites out there, not even Google, who has a page rank of 10 - as 10 would mean everything was perfect and complete and as you are probably aware, that is not possible with the way the internet is these days.

Page Rank: A History

Larry Page developed Page Rank whilst working on a project at Stanford University with Sergey Brin between 1995 and 1998, hence the name Page Rank. At the time they were working on a project about a new kind of search engine. The result of this project was, Google - now the world's biggest and most used search engine.

Page Rank Technology

Probably the best people to give you a little more information on Page Rank would obviously be the founding company themselves, Google. So here is what they have to say on the matter.

PageRank Technology: PageRank reflects our view of the importance of web pages by considering more than 500 million variables and 2 billion terms. Pages that we believe are important pages receive a higher PageRank and are more likely to appear at the top of the search results.

PageRank also considers the importance of each page that casts a vote, as votes from some pages are considered to have greater value, thus giving the linked page greater value. We have always taken a pragmatic approach to help improve search quality and create useful products, and our technology uses the collective intelligence of the web to determine a page's importance.

How to Get Your Websites Page Rank

The simplest and most effective way to get the page rank for your own website is to download the Google Toolbar.

Once you have installed the toolbar successfully then you will see the Page Rank icon appear within your web browser. Obviously the higher this rank the better your website is doing.

If your website has a low ranking and you would like to improve this, which in turn will help in getting your website higher up Google's rankings, then contact us and we can help.

*Page Rank forms a very, very small part of the whole Search Engine Optimisation process.

For more information on getting Search Engine Optimisation for your website and increase the amount of visitors you get then please contact us for more information and help.