What is Page Rank in Search Engines?
The whole process of search engine optimization revolves around getting websites ranked higher on search engine result pages (SERP). There are ways that help search engines decide how important a page is, and eventually, give it better listings on its results.
The concept of Page Rank (PR) was introduced by Google and is now its trademark as well. It is being increasingly used by companies as part of their search engine optimization services. Contrary to popular belief, it has nothing to do with a website’s listing on an SERP. It is basically a numeric value, between 0 and 10, that determines the importance of a page on the Internet. This is calculated on the basis of ‘votes’ cast for a particular web page. These votes are symbolised by the kind and number of links generated by that page.
When a page links itself to another page, it is actually recommending it, or in other words, casting its vote for that page. If the page casting the vote has a high PR, it will automatically be considered as a significant voter. Google calculate PR on the basis of the number of such votes and also the quality and importance that each vote holds.
However, it is not easy to fool Google. It has techniques to categorise the good and bad links. Being linked to link farms or banned sites can get your website penalised or blacklisted. Although you will not be held responsible for links that come into your site, you should keep a tab on the kind of sites you link out to. Optimizers should always try and keep away from websites that have a PR of zero, because, usually it is considered as a penalty.
How to calculate the PR of your web page?
PR calculation is based on the following formula: PR of your webpage = 0.15 + {0.85 * (a share of the PR of every webpage that links to it)}, wherein,
0.15 is the lowest PR held to a webpage 0.85 is the number used by Google for its PR formula ’share’ is the PR of the page linking to you divided by the total number of links on that page
Your website’s internal link exchange can help in securing better Page Ranks for certain pages that you wish to optimize. Another important point to remember is that you should remove all unnecessary links on a page. This will help in passing more PRs to other pages that you are linked to. It can actually be a very useful exercise in providing the necessary impetus to your SEO campaign.