Article by Duncan Carver:
In this article I’m going to try and provide an “idiot proof guide” to explain how Google “Page Rank” works in layman’s terms.
It’s best done through an analogy so imagine that your website’s home page is a bucket.
To gain and/or increase your Page Rank you need to fill up your bucket.
This is done by getting as many incoming links pointing to your website’s home page as possible.
The amount of Page Rank those links are going to fill your bucket with (your resulting PR value) is directly related to the Page Rank of the pages those links are on (and how many other links those pages also contain).
So for example if you have a link on a page that has a PR value of 6 – that link is going to pass less than 6 measures of page rank value into your home page.
It’s not going to pass exactly 6 measures because…
1) Chances are there are many other internal and external links on that same page where by the page rank value 6 is being shared amongst and distributed to all of the links in varying amounts.
2) Every time page rank flows out of one of those links Google actually “evaporates” a small proportion of that value. As a result, even if you have the only link on the page, you’re not going to have exactly 6 measures of PR value passed through to your home page. There is a specific reason why Google does this but it’s not really important in the context of this article.
So now that you’re filling your bucket with Page Rank value by continually building incoming links, let’s look at what happens when that collective Page Rank is distributed through your entire website.
Imagine that for every page in your website (that you link to internally), you’re essentially adding a brand new hole in your bucket.
The page rank value then starts dissipating through that hole and a certain proportion of the total value that your home page holds is now being passed down to that page (and the total value that your home page retains is slightly lessened). This is fine because it happens naturally – it’s entirely normal to link to other pages in your website.
However, the more pages you have in your website, the more holes you now have in your bucket and the less PR value your home page will retain. Further, this also means that each of those pages is going to receive less page rank unto themselves as your home page PR value is now being spread amongst all those pages.
Let’s say you have 1,000 incoming links to a websites home page and that home page has a PR value of 5. Let’s also say you have 10 additional pages in your website that you’re linking to via your internal linking structure. If you have a “strong PR5″ then it’s possible some of those other internal pages would also become a PR 5, but more likely than not, most will become PR4 or less.
Let’s take the same website, with the exact same number (and quality) of incoming links. This time we’ll add 100 pages.
Now that PR 5 value is flowing down your internal linking structure and being shared amongst 100 other pages. It’s possible that your home page might now become a PR4 (because you have more holes in your bucket) and those internal pages achieve PR values of 3 or less (because each one is receiving less share of the total available inflow of page rank).
The above is not a bad thing either, and the flow of Page Rank through your website is not linear. That is most people link back to their home page from every other page in their website. That means that although you are passing Page Rank down to all of your internal pages, a small proportion of the value is being actually passed back to your home page via those home page links. This is also why the home pages of websites tend to have the larger PR values rather than internal pages.
Similarly, most websites are setup to have a major category structure that contain a few key areas of organized content. More often that not, those links are also placed on most internal pages via the standard navigational linking structure.
The end result is that those pages will have greater PR values – rather than a page that is found 3 links removed from your home page. For example the home page might be a PR5, the category page might be a PR4, and the page linked to from that category page might be a PR3 or less.
That basically means that the pages you link to most often from within your entire website are going to receive the highest PR values.
Knowing this – if you want to increase Page Rank and have a lot of pages in your website you have 2 options.
Increase the number of incoming links to your website and focus on incoming links from pages that already have high PR values.
Decrease the amount of internal pages of your website. Of course this isn’t really an option. I just mention this because often people wonder why they start loosing page rank for no apparent reason and they don’t realize it will happen if they continually add more pages without increasing the amount of (or quality of) incoming links to the website.
To take things one step further, now imagine that for every external link you include on your website (that means linking out to another independent website) you’re also adding more holes in your Page Rank bucket. The flow of PR is now being shared amongst your internal pages and a proportion is now being lost through those external links. So the more external links you include on your website – the more page rank you’re website is going to “leak” out to other websites.
Again this is not really a bad thing – it’s also entirely natural to link out to other websites and you shouldn’t be scared to do so.
You can also mitigate the impact of leaking page rank to other website by using the “nofollow” attribute on those external links if possible.
So that is the basic “jist” of how Page Rank is gained, passed around, and lost through your website. If you’re interested there are pleanty of rather technical and specific explinations of Page Rank out there online, but hey this is the “idiots guide” and the above sums it up quite nicely if I do say so myself.
What’s most important to realise here is that having high Page Rank is not the be all and end all of obtaining high search engine rankings.
In fact, there is no direct correlation between having high PR valued pages and having high search engine rankings.
You can read more about that here.
Ultimately, all having a high Page Rank value does is to ensure Google visits your website more often to look for new pages and for any updates made to older pages. Not only that but it will also “crawl deeper” into your internal linking structure and index more pages faster, and more often.
So it can help if you want to see your websites changes become reflected in the search engine faster and speed up the end result of making any internal search engine optimization tweaks…
“We crawl (the internet) roughly in order of page rank. The higher your Page Rank the faster you will be found, the deeper you will be crawled and the more often visited…” ~ Matt Cutts.
I hope that was easy enough to follow ;-0
Duncan Carver - http://www.onlinemarketingtoday.com
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