PageRank, What is it?

If you are not into online marketing, you probably haven't heard or if you did, you must not be that familiar with what PageRank is. But what is PageRank? Is it that important?

PageRank, according to Wikipedia, is a link analysis algorithm used by the Google Internet search engine that assigns a numerical weighting to each element of a hyperlinked set of documents, such as the World Wide Web, with the purpose of "measuring" its relative importance within the set.
In other words, it is a tool used by search engines to analyze the importance of a webpage by checking on the links that connect to it. The greater the number of links, the better. The higher the PageRank of the page of that link , the more importance is given to your page. The more important your page is, the higher your PageRank will be. When the PageRank is high, it gets better ranking on the search engine results pages.

But the numbers aren't that important. Quality links means more than it.

The history of the PageRank is as old as Google itself. According to the same Wikipedia page:

PageRank was developed at Stanford University by Larry Page (hence the name Page-Rank) and later Sergey Brin as part of a research project about a new kind of search engine. The project started in 1995 and led to a functional prototype, named Google, in 1998. Shortly after, Page and Brin founded Google Inc., the company behind the Google search engine. While just one of many factors which determine the ranking of Google search results, PageRank continues to provide the basis for all of Google's web search tools.

PageRank is based on citation analysis that was developed in the 1950s by Eugene Garfield at the University of Pennsylvania, and Google's founders cite Garfield's work in their original paper. By following links from one page to another, virtual communities of webpages are found. Web link analysis was first developed by Jon Kleinberg and his team while working on the CLEVER project at IBM's Almaden Research Center.

PageRank changes once in a while. As updates on the content are made, the importance of the specific page also changes. For example, this blog, at the time of this post has a PageRank of 2, but may go up or down as new posts are added.

There are many tools that calculates shows the PageRank of a page. One most commonly used and trusted tool is the google toolbar.

This summarizes what PageRank is. In future posts, we will discuss the main concept and algorithm of PageRank in detail, but I'll post updates on this page too.

Worrying about how to get higher PageRank for your website, yet you have no time? No problem. There are great outsourcing companies and virtual assistants nowadays that can help you give solutions to your needs.