Meaning of PageRank

PageRank

For a long time, PageRank was considered very important. It said a lot about the quality of the products offered or about a company. But it has lost its importance in the last few years because Google stopped updating PageRank in 2014. Still, the question arises, what does PageRank actually mean?

What is the PageRank?

PageRank is an algorithm that was introduced by Google. With this algorithm, Google analyzed and weighted the link structure of a website. The basic principle was that the more high-quality links refer to a page on the Internet, the higher the PageRank of this website. In other words, the higher the PageRank, the more important the corresponding website is. The PageRank never made an announcement about the quality of the content of a website. It got the name from its inventor, Larry Page , one of the two founders of Google. He developed this algorithm.

What is the principle behind the PageRank algorithm?

As already mentioned in the explanation of the term PageRank, the principle of the PageRank algorithm is based on the high-quality link. The more links there are of this kind, the more important the page is. If a page can only have a few hyperlinks , then this is weighted lower than a page with many links. The PageRank can therefore be seen as the basis of the algorithms that are used by Google for ranking websites. But the PageRank has clearly lost its importance in the meantime. Today there are more and more other factors that influence the ranking of your website, for example.

Calculation of the pagerank

In addition to the number of incoming links , the weighting of the linked page also plays an important role in this algorithm . Regardless of their content, the rating will always be better if it is linked from other important pages. This means that this results in a recursive evaluation for a website based on the evaluation of the page to which a link is made. This procedure means that the entire link structure is included in the Internet. This type of link tracking is based on the so-called random surfer model . This describes the user behavior of an Internet visitor who happens to be on the web and thus calls up a wide variety of pages.

The recursive calculation of the PageRank of a website is therefore calculated as follows:

d serves as a damping factor between 0 and 1. It should be mentioned, however, that this link tracking is not continued indefinitely according to the random surfer model. This is exactly what this damping factor does. The algorithm is updated several times a year to keep it up to date.

PageRank passing on

If you have a website that is highly rated, then it can pass on its PageRank to the pages to which it refers via backlink . The more other links there are on your website, the more the value of the PageRank that is passed on is also reduced. In order to transfer the transfer of the PageRank of a website to its sub-pages, the so-called PageRank Sculpting process is used.

How can you calculate the PageRank?

It is entirely possible to calculate the PageRank. For this purpose, the PageRank spreadsheet was published some time ago by Bob Wakfer . Although it is still not known how Google determines the PageRank exactly, the experts agree that in most cases the value is easy to calculate with the help of this table.

But what does this table mean?
  • The table should be used to clarify how many links with PR x are needed to achieve a PR x.
  • As an example, let’s say you want to get a PR 6. In this case you need three backlinks with PR 7. If you want to achieve this PR 6 with backlinks PR 6, you need 18 of these links.
  • The table also says that you can achieve a certain PageRank if only a single link from another website is sufficient, which is two points higher. Specifically, for a PR 2 you need a PR 4 link, for a PR 6 a PR 8 link, etc.
  • The lower a PR value of a linked page, the more links you need to achieve the PageRank you want.
  • You cannot calculate the exact PR with this table, but it definitely serves as a very good guide.

PageRank