What’s Page Rank ?

In brief Page Rank is a “vote”, by all the other pages on the Internet, concerning how important a page is. A link to a page counts as a vote of support. If there’s no link there is no support (however it’s an abstention from voting instead of a vote against the page).

How is Page Rank Used?

Page Rank is one of the methods Google uses to determine a page’s relevance or importance. It’s solely one part of the story when it involves the Google listing, however the other aspects are discussed elsewhere (and are ever changing) and Page Rank is fascinating enough to deserve a paper of its own.

Page Rank is also displayed on the toolbar of your browser if you have installed the Google toolbar (http://toolbar.google.com/). However the Toolbar Page Rank solely goes from zero - 10 and seems to be something like a logarithmic scale:

Toolbar Page Rank:

(log base ten)   Real Page Rank
0                                            0 - 10   
one                                          one hundred - 1,000
two                                        1,000 - ten,000
3                                       ten,000 - one hundred,000
four                                          and therefore on…

We cannot grasp the precise details of the dimensions because, as we’ll see later, the most PR of all pages on the net changes each month when Google does its re-indexing! If we have a tendency to presume the size is logarithmic (although there is only anecdotal proof for this at the time of writing) then Google might merely offer the best actual PR page a toolbar PR of 10 and scale the remainder appropriately.

Also the toolbar generally guesses! The toolbar usually demonstrated a Toolbar PR for pages I’ve solely just uploaded and cannot possibly be in the index nevertheless!

What appears to be happening is {that the} toolbar appearance at the URL of the page the browser is displaying and strips off everything down the last “/” (i.e. it goes to the “parent” page in URL terms). If Google includes a Toolbar PR for that parent then it subtracts 1 and shows that because the Toolbar PR for this page. If there’s no PR for the parent it goes to the parent’s page, however subtracting two, and thus on all the way up to the basis of your site.  If it can’t notice a Toolbar PR to show in this manner, that is if it does not notice a page with a real calculated PR, then the bar is greyed out.

Note that if the Toolbar is guessing in this way, the Actual PR of the page is zero - though its PR can be calculated shortly after the Google spider 1st sees it.

PageRank says nothing about the content or size of a page, the language it’s written in, or the text employed in the anchor of a link!

Definitions

I’ve started to use some technical terms and shorthand in this paper. Now’s as sensible a time as any to define all the terms I will use:

PR:     Shorthand for PageRank: the actual, real, page rank  for every page as calculated by Google. As we have a tendency to’ll see later this could range from 0.15 to billions.

Toolbar PR:     The PageRank displayed in the Google toolbar in your browser. This ranges from zero to 10.

Backlink:     If page A links out to page B, then page B is alleged to own a “backlink” from page A.

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