Wednesday, March 23, 2005

What is PageRank and why is Google's ranking important?

PageRank™, named for Google's Larry Page who helped Sergey Brin develop the system at Stanford University, is an exclusive technology of Google which evaluates the popularity of your Website's pages by rating it between 0 and 10 with zero being little to no links to your site and 10 being Google (super, ultra, heavily linked).

Google shows PageRank for each visited site on its freely available Google Toolbar. For Firefox, Mozilla, and Netscape® 7.x users Google encourages installing the open-source Googlebar (not sure if this one shows page rank). There is also an extension for FireFox called Google Pankrank Status which will display the pagerank for the website you are visiting in your browser's status bar.

If you are adverse to installing a toolbar or extension to get the pagerank, some sites such as MyPageRank will report the ranking for you.

Why is PageRank important? Pagerank partly determines your placement in Google's results. Google's technology overview assures "human tampering with our results extremely difficult" and "no one can buy a higher PageRank." MyNippon on eBusiness blog advises to concentrate on good content and good products.

PageRank is heavily biased in favor of already popular web pages by making them even more popular (since they get found more often, they get linked more often). So what happens is that some websites continue to have low PageRank even if they have better content and new pages (with excellent content) may never be found in a search.
MyNippon further recommends marketing your website. Companies like Superior Internet Designs can be contracted for Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Some companies such as Adagio Teas view PankRank so important that they give away free product to increase their pagerank. Be aware that if you post your link to Adagio Teas in a post rather than in a permantently viewable part of your page they will only send you 1 tea. Read about Cathy's experience, Catawampus, and Zero Boss.

Mark Maughan viewed PageRank so importantly that he sued Google. (a clearer picture)

Peter Surna in June of 2003 showed us the numbers behind Google's PageRank and decried PageRank as useless unless you are writing an Internet search engine.

I close leaving the importance of PageRank for you to decide. I know two things. One, the higher my pagerank the more tea I'll receive; and two, this post helped several people's pagerank (create links whenever you can!).
djuggler's personal blog is Reality Me and he consults as Superior Internet Designs


Posted by: djuggler | 11:45 PM |