Decisions can be complicated. Google's PageRank works about the way humans mentally sort things by size or importance. There are relational factors that are not easily arranged, but seem fairly simply when you step through the process.

There are many estimations for the formula. Some are estimates on how some people would expect it would work, and others are estimations from how it seems like it works. One thing is clear, you can't buy a ranking.

One feature appears to be a relationship between the number and quality of pages that link to a site and the number and quality of pages the site links to. Too many, even too few, and the page rank score will suffer. People that build sites that simply link to numerous popular sites will find their page rank suffers.

Suppose a person has a site that simply sounds like a place that is more important, or perhaps represents a misspelling of a popular site. Suppose this then is used to funnel visitors to a site selling questionable stock tips, or cheap pharmaceuticals, or perhaps branch to a variety of pornographic sites. In these cases, the value of the feeder site is differentiated and a penalizing value is applied. The site it connects with, thereby is similarly penalized. It works out like the proverbial problem of "which came first, the chicken or the egg," but this is a little easier to determine. As one site's score is diminished, it minimizes the other site's ranking. Yet there still is something of a sense of randomness that helps equalize things.

Some simply elegant comparative values are constructed by Google's PageRank. The best advice might simply be to offer the visitors quality substance without the hype and scam of trying to trick it.

Learn more about this author, Larry Swinford.
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