by Melissa J Luther

Created on: January 24, 2009

Google Page Rank is Google's way of measuring the popularity of a given page on the internet. In its simplest form, Page Rank measures the number of links pointing to a page (inbound links), and a link equals a vote of confidence in the page. More inbound links equals more votes and a higher popularity.

Of course, nothing about any of Google's algorithms is nearly that simple. The inbound links are given weightings based on the popularity of the linking page. Of course, the popularity of the linking page is based on the inbound links it receives. This popularity contest continues on down the line and all around the internet. It's almost like one big link farm (except, of course, that Google penalizes sites that are part of a link farm).

Page Rank is quite confusing for new webmasters to contemplate, and many worry entirely too much about this mysterious entity. With all the hype, it is easy to conclude that the higher the Page Rank, the higher a site will appear in the search results page. Once again, it's not nearly that simple.

In truth, Page Rank is only one factor in determining where a page appears in Google's search results. Content can easily trump Page Rank. And most other engines don't take Google's Page Rank into account at all. In fact, Yahoo has its own page ranking algorithm called Web Rank.

One other thing to remember is that Page Rank does not apply to an entire website. Page Rank only rates individual pages, and different pages on a site can have different Page Ranks. So how, exactly does Google arrive at this Page Rank value?

Google analyzes all the links pointing to a page. Links coming from pages that themselves have a high Page Rank carry a stronger vote than pages with a lower Page Rank. This does not mean that lower-ranked pages are not valuable. It just means it takes more low-value links to equal the weight of one link from a higher-ranked page.

Internal linking also counts. Large, highly ranked sites can give themselves good link juice just by linking related pages together within the site. Smaller sites can do the same, although with less content to link together they will get a smaller boost. Regardless of the size of the site, relying only on internal links is a mistake. External link sources are required to achieve high Page Rank.

The anchor text (the clickable words) of the inbound links is also important. The word "electrical" associated with a link pointing to a pharmaceutical company website is completely irrelevant and will not be

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