What Is Page Rank

High rankings in natural listing of Search Engines a (SE) is one of the most coveted positions for the popular keywords. This is because of the Golden Triangle phenomena. Such a position results to lots of free and targeted visitors to your website. This in turn could mean lots of money. But just like a fresh kill in the Massai Mara grasslands attracts scavengers, so it is with natural listing.

Some unscrupulous webmasters and internet marketers tend to device ways and techniques to trick the SE to rank their low quality websites undeservingly high. These techniques of search engine optimsaton (SEO) are referred to as black hat. Such spammy techniques are abhorred by SEs; this simply because they interfere with the SE's business of delivering quality information on search queries. But every so often a black hat is devised that's effective in fooling SEs for some time before it is discovered and clamped down on.

To stay true to their purpose of providing high quality search results for a search term inspite of black hats, SEs have introduced various quality scores to vet the quality of a webpage. Page Rank is such a score. It is based on a science paper by Sergy Brin and Larry Page (from where the term page rank comes from) both founders of Google Inc, the leading SE company.

Craig Silverstein of Google says of PageRank, "(Its) Google's system for ranking webpage (and) is about relevance. It relies on the uniquely democratic nature of the web by using its vast link structure as an indicator of an individual page's value. In essence, Google interprets a link from Page A to Page B as a vote by Page A for Page B. But Google looks at more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; it also analyses the pages that cast the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves "important" weight more heavily and help to make the other page "important". Important, high quality sites receive a higher Page Rank, which Google remembers each time it conducts a search"

In essence, the higher a web pages Page Rank (PR) the higher in the natural SE listing the page is placed. You acquire higher PR by getting other websites to link to you website. If you can get high PR websites to link to your website the better your quality score. The interpretation is if such important high PR sites are linking to you site then it must be very important. Consequently you could be placed in that coveted Google Golden Triangle.