What’s Google PageRank?

Also known as PR, Google PageRank is a link analysis algorithm used by the Google search engine to determine the importance or relevance of a web page, based on the link popularity. Link popularity is considered to be an important factor that determines a site's ranking in the search engines. It involves factors such as the number of links going to your website or web page and also the popularity of the linking site.

Named after Larry Page, PageRank is a numeric value, ranging from 0-10, assigned by Google for each web page on the internet. This numerical weighting denotes a website’s relevance in the eyes of Google. It is used along with many other things to determine whether a page will rank well in a search. The page rank of your web page can be viewed with the help of Google toolbar.

Google PageRank for a particular web page is calculated on the basis of links within the website and links from outside the site. Consider the following equation used to calculate the page rank of your web page.

PR(A) = (1-d) + d(PR(t1)/C(t1) + ... + PR(tn)/C(tn))

In the above equation, t1 and tn are pages linking to page A; C is the number of outbound links that a page has; and‘d’ is a damping factor with a value equivalent to 0.85.

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