Google PageRank Explained

PageRank (PR) is one of the many factors Google use to rank your webpage. Yes, webpage. Each of your webpage can
have different PR. PR is determined by calculating the number of links to the webpage.

Each link is considered as a vote for that webpage, so the more votes it gets, the higher the PR it will have.

There are 2 ways to increase your PR. The easiest way is to have a good internal linking structure (navigation)
so that PR is spreaded around your own webpages. If you link to an external website, you leak your own PR to that website, but you can minimise this by having many links to your own webpages.

Confused? Lets take a look at the formula for calculating PR. Note that this is not the actual formula (only Google knows it) but a rather close estimate.

PR(A) = (1-d) + d (PR(T1)/C(T1) + ... + PR(Tn)/C(Tn))

where...
A is your webpage
T1 to Tn is the webpages that links to webpage A
PR(x) is the PageRank of a webpage
d is a damping factor between 0 and 1
C(x) is the number of outbound links on a webpage

As you can see, by having more links (represented by C) in a webpage, the PR is divided among them equally, resulting in lesser PR boost for each of them.
So if a webpage has a PR5 and have 5 links to 5 different webpages, each of them will get a spill over PR of 1.

Generally, a link from a PR7 webpage is equal to 6 links from a PR6, assuming the outbound links are the same.
So a high PR link will benefit you more than a low PR link. Note that even a PR0 link is still valuable, as it may
not be 0, but 0.4 for example.

Now, back to issue of linking to other websites. By increasing the number of links to your own webpage, it can reduce the PR spill over to each of the webpage it links. Ahem... the external website, remember?

An alternative is to use the nofollow attribute in your HTML code by adding rel="nofollow" to your anchor link (a href="url" rel="nofollow").

This practise is not allowed when you are exchanging links with other websites!
Though unspoken, it is accepted that you do not use nofollow when you are required to link to a website.
On the other hand, if you are placing a link out of your own will with no obligations, go ahead and use it.

Another issue at hand happens if you do not have good internal linking.
The potential PR boost from a webpage is not spreaded to your other webpages, resulting in wastage.
Your website will not have reached its maximum possible PageRank.
Just use any of the navigation types as suggested in Good Web Navgiation
and you can't go wrong. Remember not to have too many links (internal and external) on a single webpage
or it might be banned by search engines. As a rule of thumb, have less than 80 links.

More on the maximum PR I just mentioned. By having more webpages, you actually increase
the maximum PageRank of your website.
Do bear in mind that creating many poor content webpages will make matters worst!
Only create original content rich webpages, and you can increase the maximum PR for the good.

Increase in maximum PR does not mean that your webpages will increase in PR.
In fact, it will drop since new webpages are fighting for the PR distribution.
By intelligiently placing more links to important webpages and reducing those for less important ones,
you can control your PR distribution.

You can view a PageRank of a webpage by downloading the Google Toolbar or using a free online service such as PR Checker.
Be aware that the PR for your viewing is updated every 3 months or so by Google, so you will not see any immediate increase or decrease until the next update.

Much to the confusion of many, PR acutally differs from each of the Google datacenters, resulting in a different PR of your website in different regions. This is normal, so do not worry about it.

The best way to increase your PR significantly is to get others to link to your website.
But why will people link to my website, you ask?
You will find out in my lesson on how to build backlinks.

Alvin Ng has been actively engaging in the webmaster community since 2000 and shares his techniques to making money online with fellow Internet users.

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