PageRank™ is a proprietary system that Google uses to rank web pages according to what they consider to be important. PageRank is one of the important ways that Google uses to judge who to give high search results and without having a good PageRank it is unlikely to rank really high on the search engines for important keywords or key-phrases. Therefore it is extremely important to work on increasing you PageRank as soon as you start marketing your website.

PageRank is one of many ways that Google use judge how high a website is shown in search results. You must have good PageRank to get good results form popular keywords.

The ranking is on a scale of 0 to 10, which is calculated by Google (Google’s PageRank algorithm). It takes into consideration the content of pages and how many site links to that site and the quality of those links. Links from site with higher PageRank help to increase the PageRank of sites that they link to. The higher the PageRank the more they increase. It is believed that it is ten times more difficult to move one number up.

Google sometimes increases the level and therefore the difficulty of reaching PageRanks of 5 and above.

The closer a web page gets to a PR of 10, the higher its importance. A PageRank of 4 or 5 is considered good. Very few pages attain a PR of 10 (among those few are Yahoo! and Google itself).

Although nobody knows for a fact, it is widely believed that PageRank is determined using a logarithmic grading scale instead of a linear one. What this means is that it is much more difficult for a web page to move from a PR of 6 to a PR of 7, than it is to move from a PR of 1 to PR of 2. It is progressively more difficult to move to the next higher number. Some people even say that it gets as much as 100 times higher to move up one number. But exactly how much it is no one really knows for sure, except Google.

Also the more similar the pages that link to you are, the better quality are the links. For instance a site from a farmers site to a baseball site may have no real value to increase the baseball site’s PageRank.

Google uses PageRank to help judge the relevancy for a search and will usually give the site with a higher PageRank a higher listing. If Google gives similar pages equal relevant then the page with the higher PageRank will be listed first.

The pages with the highest rating are ranked 10 and only a few pages such as Google and Yahoo have this ranking. A PageRank of 4 or 5 is good and links from these sites will help your PageRank. Links from pages with a PageRank 3 or below will not help you much.

Using PageRank to Increase Your PageRank
You can use PR to decide who you should ask first for link as the pages that with a high PageRank have a higher link value to you and therefore are worth more effort to get.

You can check to see what PageRank Google gives each page by downloading the Google Toolbar. The Google toolbar is a plug-in that works with your web browsers. The Google Toolbar has an extra advantage which is you can make a search on Google from any page you are on. The toolbar automatically supplies the PageRank number in the web address box. You can download the toolbar by going to http://www.google.com/toolbar.html .

You can read about the Google toolbar at: http://toolbar.google.com/help.html

To read what Google says about PageRank see; http://www.google.com/technology/index.html .

site:yourdomain.com commonword

When you decide to ask for link to your site from other similar website it is a good idea to check what their PageRank is and to give greater importance to sites with a high PageRank, as the site with the higher PageRank will more increase your PageRank. So it pays to work harder to get links from websites that have higher PageRank.

Do not look for artificial links done by professionals from sites that you pay them to give you a link. Google is often hip on what these sites are and if you have a link from them they may penalize you. Google searches the pages that link to you to see if they are similar in subject matter to your site. If Google penalizes a site it may also penalize the site the link from that site. You should definitely be careful of sites that use what you consider to be dirty techniques to get you to give them a link.

You should download the Alexa Toolbar to your browser or you can check the Alexa site when you need to. Alexa toolbar is very useful as it says how popular a website is and also give reports that can give you a general idea how popular websites are. Alexa gives a good idea what are the most popular websites on the Internet. It also give a general idea how many people view the more popular sites. They also have the contact information for many of the site and also some reviews of the sites. Alexa Toolbar
(http://download.alexa.com)

Judging Value of a Link Page
It is not just important to judge the PageRank of the home page, but also important is the PageRank of where the link will come from, as it is believed that the PageRank of the link page is what Google takes into consideration and not just the PageRank of the Home Page of a site. A web page may have a rank of 5 on their home page and a PageRank of 3 on its link page. Page rank less than 4 don’t have much value and the link is basically useless.

Also it is believed that the amount of links of the page that you receive a link is important. Just say you need 1000 point to reach a PageRank of 4. If a page where a link to your site has a value of 200 points. If there are 10 links on the page, then the value of 200 points for the page is divided up amount the 10 links and each link gets a positive increase of their PageRank of 20 points. To reach 1000 points to get a PageRank of 4 you would have to get 50 links of this type to reach 1000 points. If the Page Rank of the page is 6, you would need much less links from site that have a PageRank of 6.

It is important to know that quality links are important. This is why artificial site that give many link to many site of various subject matter have little or no importance. Also if you have too many links from link farms you can be penalized and they may decrease your PageRank. This is a great reason not to use dirty techniques and fake link to increase you PageRank. These programs also really dilute the value of the web. If you want to receive permanent good results from a link make sure you get as many links from similar themed site that are popular and have a good PageRank.

Being Penalized By Google (having Page Rank reduced)
Near the third week of November, 2003 Google downgraded penalized many sites that it felt were over-optimizing their web site to increase their PageRank. It was their new algorithm change and it was given the name “Update Florida” by the search engine community.

It reduced some of the sites that it considered to be cheating down to 0 taking them out of their ranking system. If they were considered to be abusing certain commercially profitable (and competitive) keywords and phrases.

Certain activities such as putting keywords in the page title, over use (increasing the density of certain words in the main text of the page and using certain keywords in the anchor text of inbound links) can cause a site to be penalized.

Some sites had their PageRank reduced even though they were not abusing the systems causing them to disappear from searches on Google.

Also reduced were site that abused the system such as bogus networks that artificially linked site together that had nothing to do with each other and were set up just to increase PageRank of the site that they linked. This is a great reason not to use a Link Farm site.