How Google Calculate the PageRank

Page Rank is a topic much discussed by Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Experts. At the heart of PageRank is a mathematical formula that seems scary to look at but is actually fairly simple to understand. Google calculates the PageRank of your website by including each incoming link to your site as a vote. For example, if site1.com has an outgoing link to site2.com, Google considers the link as a vote for site2.com. It’s like if you were commending a reputable business to your friend your recommendation strengthens his confidence in that business.

Inbound links are one way to increase a site’s total PageRank. The other is to add more pages. Where the links come from doesn’t matter. Google recognizes that a webmaster has no control over other sites linking into a site, and so sites are not penalized because of where the links come from.

But Google doesn’t rely on the valid count of the links coming to the site in order to analyze the PageRank. The search engine robots evaluate the page linking to your site as well. The more relevant the linking page is to the keywords entered, the higher the importance that Google gives to your page. So, keep this in mind when you are idea about getting one way links to your site, or organize reciprocal links.

When analyzing the linking page, Google takes the following steps to rank webpages:

* The PageRank of the linking page.

* Whether the linking page is on-focus or off-focus. If you have a economic website, an on focus link would be a link from another economic website. A link from a site about plants would be considered off-focus.

* The number of outgoing links on the outgoing link page. A page with 500 outgoing links will not be considered as important as a page with only 20 outgoing links.

* The quality of the incoming links directed at the website of the outgoing link.

So, the quantity and quality of links pointing back to your website are the major part of the Google algorithm to analyze the PageRank.

Google considers many factors when running out your website’s rankings in search results. If often happens that a page with PR2, for example, gets a top position than other pages that PR3 or 4. So, it’s not the PageRank of a website that Google primarily focuses on when ranking a site for a set of targeted keywords.

Google must be also looking at something else to rank the sites in search results. Google is known to look at these factors when ranking a web page:

* Number and quality of the links from other sites;

* Anchor text of the links;

* Historical factors;

It is important to get as many as possible back links from quality on-focus sites. Historical factors Google takes into account are:

* When the link is discovered.

* Whether the link changes with time.

* How quickly the page gets links from other sites.

Gaining links from other sites too fast can result in your page to be de-indexed by Google. You should make the process of links growth as natural as possible.

You should consider having a link from a web page with PR2 or above if it is:

* The link is not redirected.

* On focus with your product or service.

* There are no “nofollow” tags on the links.

* There is no javascript redirect on the link.

* There are less than 50 links on the page.

* The website’s home page has a PR4 or above.

Don’t become overly concerned about your PageRank. Focus instead on properly building a high quality site with loads of great content that serves your visitors well. If you do this, improved PageRank will follow naturally. Don’t be blinded by the little green bar that shows your Google page rank. It’s notoriously inaccurate and can often be deceiving especially for low PR sites.

Focus instead on building more quality backlinks. In the end every quality link counts and if you are consistent you will increase Google Page Rank, get more traffic and make more money. Google repeats its PageRank calculatons many times at each update, and each time the calculation is made it gets more likely to be accurate. Total accuracy can never be achieved, however, because one site’s PageRank is entirely relative to the others.