Google Page Rank

Google Page Rank

Page Rank is a numeric value that represents how important a page is on the web. Google's idea behind link pop is that the more pages that link to a page, the more important the page is and it, therefore, deserves a higher ranking than it would otherwise have. Some engines simply counted the number of links coming into a page i.e Inbound Links, but Google took the idea a step further. Each inbound link comes from a page which itself has inbound links. The more inbound links on the linking page, the more important that page is and, therefore, the more important the link to our page is. So Google gives more weight to inbound links from important pages that it does to inbound links from lesser important pages. They call the idea "PageRank" and represent as PR.

PageRank is primarily determined by how many other web pages are linking into you.  Web pages with more credibility that link to you have more "value" to your PageRank than those with less credibility. Google assigned number 1 to 10 to rank pages. 10 is the the highest. So it is better to have1 link with page rank 6 rather than 100 links with page rank 3. Don't link with a site merely because they have a high PR but also consider its content and relevance to your target market.

We can categorize PRs as follows :

• 0-3:  New sites or sites with very minimal links
• 4-5:  Popular sites with a fair amount of inbound links
• 6:  Very popular sites that have hundreds of links, many of them quality links
• 7-10:  Usually media brands (NYTimes.com), big companies or A-list bloggers.

How to know Google Page Rank?

Download the Google Toolbar (the PageRank feature is not turned on by default, so you'd have to enable it after installation).  

Use the Google PageRank Calculator page on this website.  It's quick, free and requires no registration. 

You can also check your page rant at site : http://prcheker.info

How is Page Rank Calculated?
When Google introduced the concept of page rank they published the algorithm they were going to use to calculate it. The formula in it's current form is known only to the engineers at Google.

Importance of Google Page Rank
Internet is like a huge library where you can have a book on any topic in the order of relevance that means the topics coming first which are more relevant to the subject  desired by you. Now imagine a huge library having books on every topic but with no centralized organization or librarian to help you. Now it will be impossible for you to locate a small book among thousands of books without some organization or librarian.  In the word of Internet, Search Engines are doing the work of librarians and Page Rank is the tact of categorization of web pages. 
A number of search engines are doing the functions of retrieving, indexing and storage of information in an efficient format. Indexing in the order of relevance and importance is ranking of web pages but as human generated ranking is not error proof; so Google being the world's number one search engine which also  provide the results for around 80% of all the searches done in the world; invented Page Rank to provide unbiased results to search queries. Google's PageRank algorithm assesses the importance of web pages mechanically and without human evaluation of the content. It is an independent measure of the quality/authority/credibility of an individual web page.

Importance of Page Rank  for Google

We can understand the importance of Page Rank for Google from the following equation:

Search Ranking = Relevance * PageRank

Google ranks pages on the basis of relevance with your key phrase but if two pages have same relevance then whoever has the higher PageRank gets the better ranking - and shows up at the top of the results page. Measurement of relevance is a difficult process and depends on a number of factors like the title of the page, words on the page and how frequently they occur, etc.  Google has allotted a Pagerank to every page on the web according to its importance which in itself depends on a number of factors like the number of links to the page from other pages, the quality of the link means link with high page rank is worth more than a page with low page rank, the relevancy of the site that is linking to the page, the anchor text which is used for the links to your site and the keywords on your site, in the header and titles.

So, Page Rank (PR) is Goggle's way of measuring the quality and relative "importance" of a website and Google can't do its work properly without Page Rank.

Importance of Page Rank Site Owners

Page Rank is one of the important factor to determine  Search Engine Ranking Positions (SERP's) by Google, so it is very important for webmasters to understand the concept to get maximum traffic to their sites. It is also true that it an important but not the only part of Google's Search Engine algorithm. It may take up to three months for a new website to be assigned a Page Rank - depending on when Google decides to do the Google Update, where all websites' PR's are reviewed.

Importance of Page Rank for Searchers
Ordinary internet user is normally not aware of Page Rank unless and until it has installed Google Toolbar on its computer. Rather it is a term which is useful for webmasters and wesite owners. Page Rank canbe important for searchers only to know the genuinity of the site and worth of information available on a particular page.