Toolbar PageRank - Is it Worth Paying Attention?

Revealing PageRank's Dual State

A correct understanding of what is PageRank and how it works will absolve you from ineffective time and money investments especially in today's SEO environment where PageRank seems that it gained an overpriced importance.

So here's the big philosophy behind PageRank: It is developed and used by Google to evaluate the relative importance of a webpage as compared to the other market/topic related web pages; and this "importance" is measured by the number and quality of back links that webpage has. A more technical approach defines PageRank as being a link analysis algorithm.

PageRank appears in two distinct instance: 1. real PageRank used exclusively by Google and 2. Toolbar PageRank with values between 0 and 10, used by webmaters in assessing Google's trust and recognition towards a given website.

Both systems operate along the same lines, and that is the measurement of quality back links. The values that the real PageRank system uses are vast and go into millions.

What the 11 level toolbar does is sort webpages from 0 to 10, according to the real page each accumulates after launching.

Looking at two web pages, where one has a PageRank of 2 and the other has 4, the difference is not merely 2. In real PageRank scoring, the difference is multiplied many times higher.

The truth is that nobody knows how Google calculates the Real PageRank for pages in its index.

Still, there is one insight that Google give us to how it calculates a webpage real PR:

Each toolbar PageRank level is exponentially greater than the one before it, thus being more difficult to achieve. In other words What was sufficient to go from PR2 to PR 3 level, won't be enough to go from PR3 to PR4.


Here are some pointers to better perceive the PageRank mechanism:

1. Google doesn't analyze websites, it analyzes web pages.

2. The grades shown on the toolbar marry up to a wider range on real PageRank, meaning that the real PageRank values may vary little, or may vary widely.

3. Several different links that come from the same domain only count as 1 vote in the PR equation.

4. In the first instance, a web page is allotted a low PageRank score referred to as '1-d', and where the value 'd' can and does change and it is contained by what Google have christened the 'damping factor'. A newly assessed web page will be given a 'd' rating of 0.85, but in real PageRank terms this will result in a value of 0.15. This is the dual nature of PageRank in action.

5. In order for a web page to reach the top scoring end of the Toolbar, it must continue to amass an increasing quantity of inbound links.

6. Real PageRank values are made public, through the toolbar, once every three months and they rapidly get outdated as the real PageRank is permanently updated but not publicized. This is the reason why seamlessly webpages with inferior PageRank rank better than pages with superior scores.

7. PageRank is designed to measure the link structure importance of a web page.

After Google assembles a quantity of web pages within its index, it then rates them for integrity and popularity by assessing the quantity of links referring back to those pages. But there are other considerations too.


PageRank Dynamics in Action:

- A web page receives PageRank by getting inbound links from other pages.

- Links that emanate from other pages in the same website, or that come from completely different domains are given similar ratings providing those other pages bear the same PageRank values.

- Google does not penalize web pages for linking with differing web pages. It encourages genuine efforts at external linking whilst attempting to discourage any PageRank counterfeiting.

- PageRank passed to other webpages is divided between the total number of links leaving the referring page.

- Finally, due to the damping factor, an incoming link is maximized at 85% of its value.

For the most important facts about PageRank ' uncovered in the final part of this article - head over to my blog, Trafficcpanel.com.