Understanding Google PageRank

Understanding Google PageRank
Providing Internet Marketing Services to the business community, we at Direct Submit are sometimes asked to offer an everyday explanation of Google PageRank. The following extract taken from a book titled ‘Get to the top on Google’ offers, in my opinion, a fairly good overview of what PageRank is and how it is used by Google.

The heart of the Google algorithm is a link-based system developed at Stanford and is called PageRank (after Larry Page, its inventor, rather than after the pages themselves). Google explains PageRank in the following way:

PageRank 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… In a sense, then, PageRank is like a giant electronic voting system. The page that gets the most votes gets awarded the highest PageRank (on a scale of 0-10). So, grossly oversimplifying, simple importance is determined by link quantity.

This is not the whole story, however. Google goes on to explain:
Google looks at considerably more than the sheer volume of votes, or links a page receives; for example, it also analyses the page that casts the vote. Votes cast by pages that are themselves “important” weigh more heavily and help to make other pages “important.” Using these and other factors, Google provides its views on pages’ relative importance.

To view the respective PageRank for a webpage you need to have installed on your PC the Google Toolbar. The Google Toolbar’s PageRank feature displays a visited page’s PageRank as a whole number between 0 and 10. The most popular websites have a PageRank of 10. The least have a PageRank of 0.