Checking Your Google Pagerank
PageRank is basically Google’s way of determining a website’s value based on a number of factors. One of the main factors they use is how many incoming links a website has. They interpret these links almost as a confidence vote. Simply put, a site that has more votes has more value from Google’s perspective.
As the internet was emerging, a large number of sites with industry-specific content were constantly being added. Users didn’t have a lot of tools to find them. Yahoo came along and made it a bit easier as they organized its directory listing by classifying each. This led to the use of keywords so they could determine the topic of each site. Other search engines soon followed the trend and began to use the meta tags in the coding of a website to determine the topic and relevance of it.
This was fine until webmasters learned that all it took was to embed specific keyword phrases in their tags to manipulate their rankings for these phrases. The internet quickly became cluttered with sites that spammed their way to the top in this manner.The actual content of a website did not matter.
Google realized that as long as the relevance of a website was determined by the webmasters, the search results would continue to be cluttered by websites that artificially inflated their own keyword relevance. They devised a way to alter the ranking weight to include off-page factors. This included giving each site a ranking between 1 and 10 that was called PageRank.
The algorithm they used enabled them to surpass its competition by displaying more relevant websites when web surfers used their search engine. It allowed them to provide quality information while presenting a challenge to site owners that tried to manipulate the rankings.
The major search engines place importance on a website’s link popularity in evaluating its importance. This system is based on the total number and the quality of links pointing to a particular website. A webpage that links out to another one passes along a portion of its own PageRank value in the process. This means that the higher PageRank the linking page has, the higher the value passed. A website with a high PageRank and only a handful of outgoing links gives a lot more value to each one than a highly ranked site with hundreds of outgoing links. Google offers a free browser toolbar with an embedded page rank google checker that can easily be downloaded.
One of the most important aspects of search engine optimization is the building of links using some combination of both high and low credibility websites and a variety of sources. The most effective search engine optimization strategies involve building a quality website using proper and relevant keywords and then undertaking on a consistent, long-term link building campaign.
Manipulating the PageRank of a given website is not easy and is not recommended. Using these mostly antiquated techniques will quickly be noticed by the search engines and the website could easily be labeled as a spammer. Much like in real life, a bad reputation online can be incredibly hard to overcome.
For more information on the major search engines and how to make sure your website is correctly optimized, please click here. You can get more ideas on how to enhance your online presence by checking out our article on SEO services page or visiting our search optimization page.
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