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Sunday, January 18, 2009

Basics You Need to Know About PR

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By Irmin J. Roybal

Tell me what is your PR, and I will tell you where you are. (old saying, a bit rephrased)

The concept of PageRank (or PR) was developed at Stanford University, implemented by Google and now this way or another is used by majority of search engines. PR varies from 1 to 10 (no fractions) and by definition is a measure of an importance of a web page.

PR essentially is a figure of merit of link popularity of a page. The more inbound links are coming from other pages (external and internal) and the higher PR of these referring pages, the higher will be PR of the page. This is more or less the basis for determination of PR (actual algorithm is more complex). The utility of PR is: if the site is getting a lot of inbound links from high-quality sites, then this is also a good, high-PR site, and the customer directed to this site by search engine will be most certainly satisfied.

Consider the following example. Index page of Site 1 has PR 4 and 40 outbound links, of which one leads to your index page. While home page of Site 2 has PR 3 and 3 out-links, of which one points at your site home page. Which site passes to your home page higher PR? Site 2, because in spite of a lower rank, PR of this site is divided by only three links, and hence more PR will be given to your site from this link.

Usually home page carries highest PR in the site, because the majority of in-links point usually to that page. Exceptions are possible, for example, when site contains some highly visited article or graphics.

The higher PR of your page, the higher is chance that your page will be listed on top of search results. To check your pages PR you can use Google Toolbar in your browser, or you can check it (for free) with any PR serving site. My favorite is MyGooglePageRank. Check them out, (I am not affiliated with them in any way, I just like the site). Here are some high-PR pages: Wikipedia home (PR 9), Amazon home (PR 9), eBay sitemap (PR 7), and finally, Google home (PR 8).

PR is important, but for the same time it is only one of several critical parameters used in search algorithms. From my own experience a site with PR 4 devoted to a narrow niche can already steadily keep all first positions in search results of Google and Yahoo on practically all major keywords. If you will find that your pages are assigned modest 0 " 2 PRs, dont fret, it is just an indicator that you need more work on your site. Posting articles in blogs and directories, adding unique content to your site and collecting inbound links from related to your niche sites will do the best for improvement of your pages PR.

So good luck on your PR!

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