Google SEO Glossar y

5 - 6 625 – 3,125 6 - 7 3,125 – 15,625

10,000 – 100,000 100,000 – 1,000,000

7 - 8

15,625 – 78,125 1,000,000 – 10,000,000 8 - 9 78,125 – 390,625 10,000,000 – 100,000,000 9 - 10 390,625 + 100,000,000 +

What this means is that moving a page from a PageRank of 6 to a PageRank of 7 is much harder than moving from a PageRank of 4 to a PageRank of 5.

New pages that the Toolbar displays a PR value for may not have been indexed yet, and as such don't have any “real” PageRank of their own. What is happening is that one page on such a site may have already been indexed and as such PageRank has been estimated for the new page as a result. The new page generally has a PR value 1 point below an indexed page on the site, but this is just an “estimate” PageRank that exists only in the Toolbar . Before exchanging links, search for the actual page on Google to make sure that it is indexed.

Whichever scale Google uses, keep in mind that a link from another site increases your site's total PageRank, as explained next. Although PageRank is assigned per page, your site is a collection of web pages under a single domain that you control and hence can be thought as having a total “PR” value too.

Increasing PageRank

Each page of your website has a PR value, and as such you can simply add up the individual PR values of each page to arrive at the total PR that your site has (Bear in mind however that someone speaks of PR, it applies to a page). How you structure your internal links can influence to some extent what the PR value of a page will be, as will external links pointing to a page on your site. Although page PR value is important, you should really be trying to increase your total site PR value.

There are only two ways to increase your “site PR” value:

1. Get more incoming links that point to pages on your site.

2. Add new pages to your site (which was discussed in a previous chapter).

The actual PR value of each page indexed by Google on the Web is in constant flux. All over the Web, new pages are added, old pages are removed, more links are created – all of which over time decrease the “value” of your incoming links.

As the number of websites (and web pages) in Google’s index increases, so does the total PageRank value of the entire Web, and so also does the high end of the overall scale used. This is kind of like the top student setting the “curve” for an exam at college. The top student gets 100% and everyone else gets correspondingly less. Therefore, the top-ranking site (or handful of sites in actuality) gets the maximum, perfect PageRank score (which is a 10 in the Google Toolbar) and everyone else is scaled down accordingly. As a result, some web pages may drop in PageRank value for no apparent reason. If a page's actual PR value was just above a division on the scale, the addition of new pages to the Web may cause the dividing line to move up the scale slightly and the page would end up just below the new division.

What this means is that you should always strive to get more links that point to your site, otherwise your site can naturally start slipping in rankings due to this decay of PageRank value for incoming links – both from other pages on your site as well as from other websites. This is also why you should add new pages to your site on a regular basis, as additional pages will increase your site’s total PR score too.

The PageRank Equation

OK, I know you’ve waiting for it, so here is the official PageRank equation. It is calculated by solving an equation of 500 million variables and more than 3.3 billion terms (web pages):

PR (your page) =0.15+0.85[(PR (page A) / total links (page A) ) +(PR (page B) / total links (page B) )+…]

There are a couple of observations to note about the PR equation:

PR values for based on individual web pages.

The PR value of each page that links to your site in turn is dependent on the PR of the pages that link to it, and so on backwards.

A link’s value (amount of PageRank or “voting power” forwarded to the linked- to page) is at most only 85% of the linking page’s PageRank value, and this value is diluted (decreased) by the number of other links on that page.

PR has nothing to do with keywords or text in links - it is purely dependent on link quantity and link strength, as discussed previously.

Some may incorrectly conclude that a link from a page with a PR=4 with only a few outgoing links is worth a more than a link from a page with a PR=7 with 100 outgoing links because for the latter, the “voting power” or value is divided up among 99 other links.

However, you must remember the logarithmic nature of the true PageRank. This means that a link from a PR=6 page that has lots of outbound links may be worth more than a link from a PR=4 page that has only a few outbound links. Whether this is true is dependent on the actual log base used for the PR equation, which is a secret.

Do not get caught up in the minutiae of determining whether a site is worth exchanging links with. Barring link farms, Free-For-All (FFA) sites, sites with a true PR of 0 (which either aren’t indexed or have been “blacklisted” by Google), and sites that have nothing to do with your theme, you should strive to get more links that point to your site - period.

Google performs multiple iterations of the PageRank equation for each page in it’s entire index to determine the new PageRank value each month.

PageRankBeingReplaced?

Google has done a major reweighing of the ranking factors it uses in the recent past, in particular how it analyzes links. Links are being scored in a new way and some links just may not count for as much or not at all. PageRank (PR) is calculated once a month for every page in the Google index. The PR score for a page is pretty static until the next time around that PR is calculated, and is computed based on ALL links that point to a page. There is evidence to suggest that Google will be replacing PageRank with LocalRank, which computes a link score based only on incoming links from pages that are returned from a given search result set that matches the search query (whether the result set is 100, 1000 or 10,000 pages is not yet known). Which means that a flower site only gets links counted from other sites that are related to flowers - not from sites that are about mortgage loans for example. This is similar to how the Teoma search engine does it.

Think of LocalRank has a dynamic PageRank score that is computed on the fly each time for a given search query PageRank has been abused as more people try to get as many links as possible to their site – regardless of whether the other site has anything to do with the topic of the linked-to page. By using LocalRank, Google hopes to filter out irrelevant links that has thrown the value of PageRank off in the past.