Google Page Rank – A Beginners Guide

Pagerank is about whether you are in Google’s main index, or not in. It’s as simple as that from my observations. A high PR won’t rank about a low PR page just on PR. The only good thing about a lot of Google Pagerank, is you can get a lot more pages into Google – that’s it.

1. Toolbar Pagerank and Pagerank are two different, unsynchronised measurements based on the number and quality of links that pass pagerank to a particular page.
2. Google Toolbar Pagerank Not Visible? Just because a page has a Toolbar grey bar does not mean a page has no real pagerank – it can mean that of course, but it can mean other things. I’ve theorised Toolbar Grey Pages do not pass pagerank to external sites, and may be an indication Google has an issue with the page.
3. A white Google Toolbar generally signifies that the page has a measure of Real Pagerank, and that Pagerank score will be reflected in the next Pagerank update (which happens whenever Google decides will happen) – one of the most common questions about Pagerank is “When Is The Next Google Pagerank Update?
4. The fast way to lose PR is to openly sell links on your website. This is now officially against Google Webmaster Guidelines for inclusion.
5. The most common reason for a drop in Toolbar Pagerank is simply your website is recieving less Pagerank via the links it has pointing to it from other sites. This could be because the pages those links on them have less PR to give, the links themselves have dissappeared and no linger point to your site, or Google has in fact changed the way Pagerank works.
6. At the moment, a tangible effect when Google penalizes a site, is a reduction of visible Toolbar PR. Many sites who openly manipulated Google SERPS via paid review blogging and link-selling had their Google PR dramatically reduced in the last quarter of 2007 in Google’s opening salvo in the “war on paid links’, or so Google would have us believe.
7. Toolbar PR has little or no effect on amount of visitors Google will send you – believe me. Perhaps this is why bloggers who had PR devalued reported no loss of visitors from Google. A reduction in real PR however could see less pages on your site being indexed.
8. Many believe Google can’t find all paid links, and are using the Google Toolbar to spread FUD,
9. If you install the Google Toolbar you will see a green indicator in your Internet Explorer / Firefox toolbar showing you the Google Page Rank of the page. Hovering over the green bar will give you a number which is the page’s Google Page Rank.
10. It’s accepted that Toolbar Pagerank is more than a few weeks out of date as little as 2 weeks out of date by my observations. That is, Toolbar PR and Real PR.
11. Google Toolbar / DC PR is not an accurate representation of your current Real Page Rank and now that Google openly manipulates what you see, the integrity of the toolbar PR is very questionable indeed in some comminites like the seo community for instance – although in 2009, for most sites, it seems pretty accurate and sensible to me.
12. Think of Google Toolbar PR as ‘an indication of the PR of what your site might have been a couple of weeks ago.
13. To get a higher Page Rank for your domain, you need to get a lot of other pages with PR to link to you. I used an analogy to visualize Google PR, and used this same Google Heat analogy to get a PR 7 site until PR was apparently reduced within the SEO community, and this site fell to PR 5.
14. Page Rank flows, and so can be manipulated, channeled, blocked (with NoFollow) and screwed up. My Google Heat article explains how you can channel PR around a site. Just substitute “Heat” for “PR”.
15. Remember sites don’t have Google Pagerank, pages do. That’s why it’s possible for an internal page to have a higher PR than the home page.
16. The way a page gets Google Page Rank is from links to it and that’s the only way of Increasing Google Pagerank. IBLs (incoming backlinks) from high Google Page Rank pages can give you more Google Page Rank ‘Juice’ than links from low Google Page Rank pages. There is one other factor at play. The Google Pagerank they “give” is spread over the number of outgoing links on the pages. You may get more Google Page Rank benefit from a Google Page Rank 3 page with only two outbound links than a Google Page Rank 5 page with hundreds of outbound links.
17. Google looks to be rolling out PR changes month to month recently. One thing you can be sure off: When Google revises Google Page Rank the fastest way to discover it is at Digital Point.
18. I’ve seen sites go from anywhere from PR 0 to PR 7 in one update although in 2009 it’s MUCH HARDER to manipulate Pagerank the way I used to circa 2007 when Toolbar PR was a joke.
19. One still useful aspect of PR is that when an update happens you can use Toolbar PR to monitor how effectively you have spread potential Google Juice or Google Heat through a site architecture.
20. I could go into Google PR being a recursive algorythim, with decay factored in, and probably pretty far removed from the original Google Pagerank paper created by Larry Page who it’s actually named after, but this is a beginners guide and I don’t know enough about the maths anyway. You don’t need to either. Just get links from other sites!