Everything you need to know about Google’s PageRank System

Hands down the world’s most popular web search engine service – and one of the most powerful tech companies in human history – Google continues to innovate and improve their influence in all things relating to the Internet. With a stripped-down and seamless approach to each and every one of their services (offering everyone the kind of blazingly fast, reliable, and super advanced technologies that other companies do – but almost always completely and totally free of charge), it should come as no surprise to anyone that Google has become the number one name in search engine services.

However, one of the more important details to understanding how their search engine algorithms work to organize websites in relation to one another – and which sites should be pushed to the top of their search engine results for any given keyword string and which should be relegated to lower spots on the list – is the concept of Google’s PageRank System.

One of the things that so many different search engine optimization experts focus on when they begin to lay the groundwork for their search engine strategies, understanding how Google’s PageRank system works gives you an almost unfair advantage when you’re trying to blow away the competition. And this will give you the ability to claim the top spot – or at least get closer to the top spot then you would have been able to otherwise – with very little effort whatsoever.

Let’s dive right in.

Understanding the concept behind PageRank and how it plays into the grand scheme of things

Before we get into the more mechanical issues in regards to generating higher and higher PageRank for your web properties, we need to first outline the basic details behind the concept of the PageRank.

In the early days of the web (back when there were only a few thousand websites all across the Internet), it was relatively easy to determine which websites had other kind of information you were looking for and which ones would be of no assistance whatsoever.

However, with the boom in the Internet’s popularity increasing each and every single year – and with literally billions and billions of individual pages a littering the Internet (with millions more being added on a daily basis), this is just no longer the same simplified landscape.

Search engine like Google need to be able to comb the entirety of the web in the blink of an eye and return relevant results to whatever keyword string is entered into their search engines system – and to do this they need to generate as many shortcuts as they possibly can. One of the biggest ones that they have access to – and one that they have created entirely for their own internal systems – is the concept of PageRank.

Not just valuing your web properties based upon how many inbound links that you have (or any number of other search engine boosting tactics that you can apply to your page), but rather taking in the entirety of all parts and ranking your website based on the sum of those factors, PageRank is essentially the Google algorithm deciding just how relevant your information is.

How does the actual algorithm adjust my PageRank?

This is a little bit of a tricky question to answer, specifically because Google has never – and probably will never – revealed the details behind their search engine algorithm (for obvious reasons). Doing so would allow anyone and everyone the ability to “game the system”, so to speak – forever changing the landscape of organic search results and potentially ruining the reputation that Google has built all over the world.

That being said, we do understand some basics about how the algorithm that Google uses reflects the PageRank that your website will enjoy. One of the first things that contribute directly to your PageRank is not just the amount of inbound links (also known as back links) that your website is able to generate, but actually wear those back links are coming from.

This means that you could have literally hundreds and hundreds of back links – thousands even – but if they were from a low level websites (brand-new websites, websites that have no back links of their own, or websites that are irrelevant to the content that you have on your page) your PageRank wouldn’t increase even in the slightest bit.

On the other hand, if you had just a few hundred incoming links and most of them were from reputable websites (with high page ranks of their own) and the odds are likely that your PageRank would continue to climb and your site would jump or leapfrog over others in the organic rankings for a specific keyword.

There are also a number of other factors that play directly into increasing your PageRank – including social signals like Facebook likes and Twitter retweets, the specific linking structure behind your back links and inbound links, and the age of your domain name, the relevancy of all the information on the page to the specific keyword terms, and a whole host of other bits and pieces.

Basically, if something has anything to do with foundational or fundamental search engine optimization tactics, it’s likely that it contributes directly to your PageRank.

Why do I need to focus on boosting my PageRank in the first place?

This should be relatively obvious, but still critical to point out.

The higher that your PageRank is, the higher that your web properties are going to rank in Google for any number of different keywords and search terms.

Obviously, with more and more people using the web to purchase products and services – or just investigate the products and services they are thinking about picking up before purchasing them – getting to the top spot in Google (the most popular web search engine out there) is finally important.

Increasing your PageRank increases your influence dramatically, and with some studies showing that only around 3% of online searchers clicking on any organic links below the sixth one on the first page, you simply cannot leave this kind of thing to chance.

Focus on the fundamentals of search engine optimization, try to increase your PageRank as much as humanly possible, and you’ll watch as your website – and profits – continue to shoot up, up, up.