Google PageRank Explained : how Google sees your website

Pagerank is a score assigned by Google. The search engine assigns an importance by generating a score out of 10 (10 being the highest level of importance).

Importance of a good PageRank

This score assigned to your site has a direct influence on what position your website will appear within the Google search results. We know about Pagerank that it places a strong emphasis on link popularity, this is how many sites have linked to your site and the individual Pagerank of these sites. The theory is that if you have lots of popular sites linking to you then your site must be providing quality content.

Pagerank of 0, what is wrong with my site ?

There might be several reasons why your site has a PR of 0 :

-1- Your website is new - this is probably the most common reason for having a PR of 0. For a new site to achieve Pagerank it must first obtain a link from a 3rd party website whereby the page containing the link has a PR of 3 or higher.

-2- Google has not yet identified your links - You may be in a situation where you have achieved a link from a PR3+ page but Google has not yet crawled this page to identify the link or if it has, you may be waiting for the toolbar to be updated. The frequency at which the toolbar is updated is not made public however we would guess at around once a month.

-3- You have been penalised by Google - This may occur through excessive use of spamming techniques. Google are very clear on their commitment to maintaining the relevancy in their search results, any attempt to deceive their web bots may incur a penalty. Certain penalties are automatically applied and expire over a certain period of time other penalties are attached permanently to your domain name making it very difficult to achieve high rankings in the future.

Why is the PageRank not the same on every page of my site?

Generally speaking, Pagerank decreases as you click deeper into a website's content. The amount of PR lost through each click is usually 1, this is an obvious reason to pay particular attention to your link and directory structure, a flatter layout is always better and you should ensure your valuable pages are never more than 2 clicks away from the homepage.

Why is my Pagerank bar greyed out?

A grey Pagerank bar indicates one of several situations. The first most common reason is that the page in question has not been indexed. In other words : the page does not appear in the Google directory, either the web crawlers have not yet found the page or it has slipped from the index and is waiting to be re-crawled. Secondly the page may have been banned by Google for the use of spam or link farming, you must be aware that a page containing hundreds of links is at risk of being banned whether genuine or not, be careful who you link to and keep the total links on a given page below 100.

Is my Pagerank affected by external websites I link to?

The short answer is yes, just as an inbound link can increase PR an outbound link can reduce it. Be careful not to link to too many pages with a PR of 0 and avoid linking to bad neighbourhoods such as link farms and pyramids, this may occur if you exchange a lot of links.

How to improve your PageRank ?

The answer is by using backlinks. The more websites links to your page, the higher your PageRank are. But under one condition, you need to have high PageRank page to link to you, else it won’t help increase your PageRank at all. And based on Google PageRank algorithm, if a site with high PageRank link to you, your link which is displayed in the page will have to share the PageRank value with other links in the same page. That is why it is adviced to keep less links in a high PageRank page so that the link would be more valuable. If your link is displayed under a webpage with PageRank 7 but there are 100 links in the page, definately it won’t increase your PageRank much therefore the link exchange is not worth it at all.

How do I know my PageRank ?

Google provides a toolbar : Googles Toolbar. Once installed, you will see a button called 'PageRank'. The toolbar will show you the pagerank of the webpage you visit.