Measuring Page Rank

Posted by John

October 19, 2007

Web Site Promotion for the Small Business v2
October 19, 2007

All of this site promotion stuff is great, however, if you can’t measure your efforts, what good are they? If you spend 40 hours a week to promote your site and you gain 1 new visitor, you’ve wasted 40 hours. Promotion of your web site increases your PageRank™. Instead of trying to explain how this works, I’ll let the pros do it. Below, you will find a quotation from one of Google’s pages and it explains how PageRank™ works. They should know. They created it.

Introduction

Google runs on a unique combination of advanced hardware and software. The speed you experience can be attributed in part to the efficiency of our search algorithm and partly to the thousands of low cost PC’s we’ve networked together to create a superfast search engine.

The heart of our software is PageRank™, a system for ranking web pages developed by our founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin at Stanford University. And while we have dozens of engineers working to improve every aspect of Google on a daily basis, PageRank continues to play a central role in many of our web search tools.

PageRank Explained

PageRank relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page’s value. In essence, Google interprets a link from page A to page B as a vote, by page A, for page B. But, Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyzes the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.

Of course, important pages mean nothing to you if they don’t match your query. So, Google combines PageRank with sophisticated text-matching techniques to find pages that are both important and relevant to your search. Google goes far beyond the number of times a term appears on a page and examines dozens of aspects of the page’s content (and the content of the pages linking to it) to determine if it’s a good match for your query.

Integrity

Google’s complex automated methods make human tampering with our search results extremely difficult. And though we may run relevant ads above and next to our results, Google does not sell placement within the results themselves (i.e., no one can buy a particular or higher placement). A Google search provides an easy and effective way to find high-quality websites that contain information relevant to your search.

Google Technology. 25 April 2007. Google.

Now that you know what PageRank™ and how it works, you need to know how to tell where your site stands, ie, what’s your PageRank™. In simple terms, your page rank is your location in the search results. You want people to find your website before they find another site with similar information. The simple answer on how to measure your PageRank™ is to search Google for keywords that are in your site and count how many sites come before yours. In the example below, the search term was “coffee” and my site, for the purposes of this example, is www.starbucks.com.

In this search, my site came up as the third actual entry, but the second item overall. This is a good placement and the site has good SEO.

If your site is not ranking high enough, you may need to adjust the content on the site to better match the keywords being used to find your site.

If you enjoyed this post, please make sure you register to receive these posts via email. You can also follow me on Twitter, link to me on LinkedIn, or visit my other blog, at www.spendingless101.com.

© Copyright 2009, John A. Simpson. All Rights Reserved.