Mike from Alberta writes:
“I am trying to start a business from home and as I study I keep reading about Google page rank. What is Google page rank? It seems everyone talks about how important it is, but I can’t find a clear explanation of what it is and how it works. Thanks.”
Dear Mike,
It takes guts to start a business from home! Good for you. I know it can be tough when there are terms floating around that everyone seems to understand but you. Let me see if I can help clear this up for you.
Spend any time talking about search engine position and you will eventually come across the phrase “Google Page Rank” or just “PR”. For many it is one of the most confusing terms around.
I’m about to shock some of you. Ready? Here goes:
GOOGLE DOES NOT RANK WEBSITES
Are you shocked? Here’s why: Google doesn’t rank sites, Google ranks individual pages within a site.
All-In-One-Business.com has somewhere around 2,500 individual pages. Some of those pages are completely internal—meaning they are used by me and my staff internally and are not available to the public. Some of those pages are available only to customers for certain products. Some of those pages are available to the general public.
Google has “indexed” those public pages on my site—as of today they have 584.
When anyone anywhere in the world types in any search term, Google looks at all the pages in their index—including mine—to pull out any individual pages relevant to the search phrase.
So for one search phrase I may have a page that is number 1 on Google. But for another search phrase I may not have ANY pages showing up. I may have one page that shows up #1 for one search phrase and #25 for a slightly different search phrase.
That’s because Google doesn’t rank websites, Google ranks all of the individual pages within a website.
Got it so far? Good. Now it begins to get complicated.
Most people in the world assume Google ranks the pages in the search engine result pages (or SERPs) according to the particular keywords actually ON the page. The “perfect” page scoring #1 and next most perfect page #2, etc.
The reality is much smarter—and more complicated.
Google looks at two types of data to determine where to rank a page on your site in its SERPs.
First, Google looks at ON PAGE factors. On page factors are all things you, as the website owner, control. These include the title of the page, the headlines on the page, the page content and a thing called “keyword density” (don’t worry about these yet—we’ll cover it in a later lesson.)
The biggest factors Google uses are not even on your page—or even on your site. The biggest factors Google uses to determine what your page is about are called OFF PAGE factors.
Off page factors include: The number of other web pages that link to your page (called back links), the importance of those pages (called Page Rank), the subject content of those pages and the linking text those pages use to link to yours.
Back links are simply links from someone else’s page to your page. Pretty simple.
Page rank is a little more complex.
Page rank is a number from 0 to 10 which Google assigns to every page it spiders. To Google the page rank determines how “important” an individual page is compared to other pages on the web.
The higher the number the more important Google sees the page. Page rank 10 pages are the most important, page rank 0 pages are the least important.
Important note: “Page Rank” is often a misunderstood term since we often use the word “Rank” to refer to how a page comes up in the search results. Often people think a page rank 10 page will be in the number 10 position in the search results, a page rank 8 will be in the 8th position and so on. Page rank is not the order a page will show up in the search results!
A good way to think of page rank and importance is to view each page as having a certain number of “votes” to give to another website. When a high page rank page like CNN.com (page rank 9) links to a web page, Google sees CNN’s “vote” as much more important than a link from a site like my SeminarBonuses.com website with a page rank of zero.
How much more important is a “vote” from a high page rank page?
Each page rank number is worth roughly eight times the number below it, meaning a link from a PR 2 page is viewed by Google as important as 8 PR 1 pages. PR 3 links are worth 8 PR 2 or 64 PR 1 (8 x 8).
A PR 7 link is worth:
8 PR 6 Links
64 PR 5 Links (8 x 
512 PR 4 Links (8 x 8 x 
4096 PR 3 Links (8 x 8 x 8 x 
32,768 PR 2 Links (8 x 8 x 8 x 8 x 
262,144 PR 1 Links (8 x 8 x 8 x 8 x 8 x
While this is somewhat of an oversimplification, it will serve to help us find niches we can easily dominate.
You want to have as many “votes” as possible from other web pages as possible. You can get thousands and thousands of PR 1 and PR 2 pages or you can get a few PR 5, PR 6 and PR 7 pages.
Obviously a small number of higher page rank pages are much easier to get and maintain than a huge number of lower PR pages.
So if you have a web page all about cultivating elm trees and want to score highly for the term “cultivating elm trees” then ideally you want many high page rank pages about elm trees on other sites to link back to your page with the term “cultivating elm trees” in the linking text.
Now that you understand how Google ranks pages, you can put that knowledge to work to get top search listings for YOUR pages.
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